Since Freud, words are considered to be essential to restore mental health.

However, words are not an option for many patients: from babies (who were not believed to experience pain during many years since they could not speak) to the Elderly with neurodegenerative diseases, including also patients able to speak but reluctant to open up.

These patients are at high risk of suffering and deserve psychological care.

Is Vagus nerve therapy the pathway towards recovery from Long Covid?

Claire-Marie RANGON, MD, PhD

VNSociety Founding Member

Child Neurologist and Pain Specialist, INWE’CARE Medical Center, France

ABSTRACT

For the first time in the history of human infectious diseases, clinical trials assessing noninvasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) in acute severe sepsis have been launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, growing evidence lay emphasis on nVNS as a convenient therapeutic solution to recover from Long COVID (LC), the entity gathering heterogeneous long-term symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, probably one of the greatest health care crises facing the world today.

Vagus nerve and central cholinergic system impairment do play a central pathogenic role in the post-COVID condition, independently of the severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection, explaining why vaccines do not fully protect against LC. Therefore, nVNS could pragmatically help recovering from the whole spectrum of phenotypes described in LC, supported by the first promising clinical trials, showing efficiency, innocuity and large-scale patient-self-administered use. Even, the same rationale supports nVNS as an efficient prevention tool against LC, whatever the SARS-CoV-2 variant, in the at-risk population, easily screened based on HRV prediction and other affordable diagnosis tools.

At last, understanding the pivotal role of vagus nerve dysfunction during SARS-CoV-2 infection could, paradoxically, turn the burden of LC into an opportunity to unravel the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases and “Medically Unexplained Symptoms” so far…