Preventing dementia, coronavirus long-haulers and hydrogen peroxide in energy drinks
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What is the overall focus of today’s Health Report episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hello and welcome to this week's Health Report podcast with me, Norman Swan. Today, a medication which may prevent cancer and dementia and costs a few cents a day. Too good to be true? Well, wait and see. They say that 50% of dementia is preventable. An Australian study shows benefit from a cocktail of non-drug interventions. And a story about energy drinks, which will stand your hair on end or maybe even bleach it. Just joking about that bit, but the research is serious. And the longer the coronavirus pandemic drags on, the clearer it becomes that for some people with COVID-19, symptoms don't simply clear up when the infection does. Anecdotal reports on a growing body of research suggests persistent fatigue, shortness of breath and brain fog, amongst other symptoms, are plaguing COVID-19 patients for weeks and sometimes months after they were infected.
Tegan Taylor is taking a well-earned vacation this week and in her stead we have her colleague and health reporter Olivia Willis. Liv, welcome back to the Health Report.
Good to be
here. Regular Health Report listeners would know that Liv occasionally presents the Health Report and you've been looking at this story, Liv.
I have, yeah. It's a very interesting and a little bit of a concerning one, really.
Yes. What proportion of COVID-19? I mean, I've looked at the literature here. It's all over the shop in terms of the proportion.
Yeah, it's really difficult to say because even though it feels like we've been in this pandemic forever, in terms of research, it's still kind of early days and we certainly don't have any long-term data on the effects of COVID on the body and even the medium-term data is kind of limited. In saying that, there are some estimates. So there was a study in Italy in July that looked at about 140 people with acute COVID infections and and found that almost 90% of them were still experiencing symptoms two months later.
90%?
90%. That's kind of acute infections.
So it was a selected group. Yeah.
How common are long‑COVID symptoms and who is most at risk?
In the US, they've looked at a broader group of people, which the severity of their disease really ranges from mild through to more severe. And they found that number was closer to about 10% to 15%. And a report from the CDC, again, I think found about a third that were still experiencing or not totally back to normal health within two, three weeks. And so it varies a little bit. I'd say it's a significant minority, but we're not sure exactly how many yet.
But when you've got tens of thousands of cases, even 10 or 15% turns out to be a lot.
That's exactly right, yeah.
And what's the relationship between severity and the long-term effects?
Well, in some ways, you'd obviously expect to see a kind of correlation in a way between the severity of disease at the acute stage of the infection and maybe the likelihood of ongoing symptoms. But that's not really necessarily what we're seeing with COVID. So symptoms like ongoing fatigue, breathlessness, difficulty concentrating are being reported by people who had mild cases to begin with or who were even asymptomatic. And
they can be younger as well.
Yeah, that's right. So it's affecting people of various ages, people who don't necessarily have pre-existing health conditions. And in some cases, it seems like the symptoms are taking some time to appear.
Oh, really?
So they might be feeling okay. And then several weeks later, either symptoms kind of reemerge or if they never had symptoms to begin with, that's when they start to experience them.
How tight a relationship is there with COVID-19? Again, I've seen reports where people are getting these symptoms, but they haven't tested positive for the virus.
Yeah, it's an interesting one. I've seen lots of those too. And I think in some cases, certainly in the US, they're saying that people may not have qualified for a test early on when the testing was quite limited. So they weren't able to get a test and then experience symptoms much later. And they've kind of put it down to it's likely that they had a COVID-19 infection, but they didn't necessarily test positive to the virus at the time because they couldn't get a test.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the overall focus of today’s Health Report episode?
0:01–1:49
2
How common are long‑COVID symptoms and who is most at risk?
1:49–7:08
3
What does the new Australian study say about metformin and dementia risk?
7:08–16:03
4
How does metformin work beyond blood‑sugar control – genetics, gut microbiome and ageing?
16:03–23:05
5
What were the key cognitive‑function findings from the Sydney Memory and Ageing Study?
23:05–28:09
6
What did researchers discover about hydrogen peroxide formation in energy drinks?
28:09–31:16
7
Which ingredients in energy drinks increase hydrogen peroxide risk and how can consumers spot them?
31:16–32:49
8
What listener questions were answered in the mailbag – olive oil, tattoo‑related uveitis and bush‑fire taste changes?
32:49–33:15
Speakers
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