Researchers Are Studying Whether Paxlovid Can Treat Long COVID

Months after catching COVID-19 in December 2021, Lavanya Visvabharathy was still testing positive on antigen tests and suffering from symptoms including headaches and intense fatigue. So Visvabharathy, a research assistant professor of neurology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who has studied Long COVID since 2020, decided to conduct an experiment on herself. She asked her doctor to prescribe her Paxlovid, an antiviral therapy that can treat COVID-19 by inhibiting replication of the virus that causes it. Paxlovid is meant to keep high-risk patients with acute COVID-19 from developing severe disease, but Visvabharathy thought it might have another use. Since she was still testing positive months after getting infected, Visvabharathy had a hunch—based on her research—that pieces of that virus were still in her system. She hoped Paxlovid could clear away those remnants of SARS-CoV-2 and ease her Long COVID symptoms. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The results of her experiment, which she published as a case report in Frontiers in Medicine in September, were mixed. A standard five-day course of Paxlovid initially eased her symptoms, and she began testing negative. But about a month after taking the antiviral, she started testing positive again, and her headaches came back. Visvabharathy, who has the autoimmune condition rheumatoid arthritis, temporarily stopped taking her biologic immunosuppressant to see if that would help clea...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news