Provocative Declaration: Long COVID Needs to Be Classified as Central Nervous System Condition

While biomedical researchers across the developed world have been investigating COVID as well as long COVID our society has not progressed that far in a better understanding of this condition according to Steven Phillips at COVID Collaborative and Global Virus Network and Michelle A Williams, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health as the authors cite a lack of any explanatory hypothesis neatly fitting into a scattergram emerging from basic, clinical and epidemiological research. 

Enter the present authors’ “unifying hypothesis that connects a triggering viral  infection  to  the  pathogenesis  and  the  plethora  of  200  symptoms:  that long  COVID  is  a central  nervous  system  disorder  of  biologic  origin,  provisionally  named  “Post-COVID  CNS dysfunction (PCCD)”.  Applying advancing neuroscience to the COVID-19 and long COVID crisis, the authors of this latest work hypothesize that virus-induced biological mechanisms acting on or within the central nervous system, meaning long COVID is at its core a neuroscience-based condition. Now, the authors propose comprehensive orchestration of past and present day research to test the PCCD hypothesis.