For some time, we’ve been tracking the Harvard/MGH clinical study currently assessing the efficacy of vitamin supplement Nicotinamide Riboside “NR” (FAQs) (Reviews) in alleviating some of the symptoms associated with “long haul COVID”. In a presentation this past week entitled “A Randomized Placebo Controlled Parallel Group Clinical Trial testing the impact of Nicotinamide Riboside (NR) on NAD+ Levels and Long COVID symptom recovery: Preliminary Baseline Findings“, Harvard’s Dr. Edmarie Guzmán-Vélez shared some of her preliminary findings. We encourage you to watch the presentation in its entirety (video embedded below). If you don’t have time, here are some key quotes:

Key Quotes:

“…We are now learning more and more that there’s a significant percentage of individuals who were infected with COVID that actually never fully recovered and continue to experience symptoms.

It’s known as “long COVID”, “long haulers”, “PASC”.

So I’ll use the name “long COVID” today to refer to those individuals who were infected with COVID but never fully recovered.

And so these individuals report that a lot of their symptoms never went back to baseline or never fully recovered — but also, some symptoms started a few months or weeks after infection.

And these are the most common symptoms that people report with long COVID with the most common being fatigue, headache.

And, so, the more red the color is (see slide) the more common that symptom is:

And you can also see that a lot of people also complain of attention difficulties, memory loss with the so-called “brain fog”.

Individuals also report a lot of sleep issues particularly insomnia, anxiety, symptoms of depression.

So it’s a multi-system disorder that causes all sorts of symptoms.

And definitely neurological symptoms are very prevalent — and also some of the most debilitating in these individuals.

Now, it’s unclear how many individuals specifically have “long COVID”.

Some people say about 30% of individuals who were infected — others much less.

It’s very unclear in part because people define “long COVID” differently.

But i think we can all agree that it’s a huge problem.

It’s millions of individuals who are experiencing “long COVID” and it’s likely to be impacting some groups disproportionately.

We know that COVID 19 for example disproportionately affected some ethnic and racial minorities.

It’s also impacting quality of life and daily functioning.

It’s estimated that about 1.5 million individuals either stopped working or went part-time due to “long COVID” symptoms.

And we’ve definitely seen that in our participants.

A lot of them have stopped working or are only working part-time or completely switched jobs.

And this is likely to become worse due to the recent COVID wave because even though omicron didn’t cause a lot of severe symptoms, we know that a lot of individuals with “long COVID” never ended up in the hospital.

And even a lot of them who had mild symptoms were relatively young and healthy.

So it’s very likely that the number of individuals with “long COVID” will continue to increase.

And unfortunately we don’t have any treatment for it — although in part, it’s because we’re still trying to figure out what “long COVID” is”

Long COVID / NAD+ / NR:

“Now, something that we know is that Coronavirus in general disrupt the NAD+ metabolome.

And COVID 19 may also disrupt the NAD metabolome and NAD+ cofactor found in every cell of the body and its involvement in multiple metabolic pathways.

We know that decreased NAD impairs the krebs cycle and that there is an overall reduction of ATP production and brain metabolism.

We also know that NAD decreases with age and particularly in neurodegenerative disorders.

And Nicotinamide Riboside “NR” (FAQs) (Reviews) is a form of vitamin B3 that is a precursor to NAD+.

And therefore, NAD can be replenished via supplementation of Nicotinamide Riboside (NR).

Some research, mostly based on animal models, have shown that increasing NAD+ improves mitochondrial activity.

It prevents axonal degeneration, decreases inflammation.

It’s been shown to help with some pathological abnormalities seen in Alzheimer’s disease.

And what’s also very important is that Nicotinamide Riboside (NR) is safe and it’s well tolerated.

And as such, it’s a promising treatment or supplement to help reduce some of the symptoms that individuals with “long COVID” are experiencing.

And so the goal of this clinical trial…is to test whether Nicotinamide Riboside (NR) can increase NAD+ levels in individuals with “long COVID” and help improve some of the symptoms that they are experiencing — over a six-month period.

Specifically, we are measuring whether Nicotinamide Riboside (NR), in addition to increasing NAD levels, if it can help improve cognitive functioning in these individuals both objectively and subjectively, whether it can help reduce some of the neuropsychiatric symptoms individuals experience as well as improve physical functioning”

Preliminary Findings:

“…So let’s get into our preliminary findings.

So, consistent with the literature, the average age of our participant, it’s 48 years.

It seems like a lot of studies are reporting that a lot of individuals complaining of “long COVID” are in their 50s.

We have individuals as young as 29 up to 65.

Most of them are highly educated — which is not surprising.

They’ve completed university or more — but all have at least some college experience.

Most of the participants are female — but we almost have a half / half split in terms of sex.

Most of them are white.

We have one person identifying as black or african-american and one identifying as hispanic or latino.

And this is something that we’re hoping to change.

We’re really striving to have a more ethnically and racial diverse sample.

In terms of BMI — the average was 29.

And surprisingly most of them were pretty healthy prior to being infected with COVID.

…And so with the COVID symptom questionnaire that I mentioned earlier, we were able to track how many symptoms people are experiencing.

And the average number of symptoms is 11.

And it ranges from 5 to 20.

So some people are complaining of five symptoms, some people are complaining even 20 symptoms.

So there’s quite a bit of variability.

And the average time from infection to study entry is 68 weeks.

And as a reminder a year has 52 weeks.

So, most of our participants were infected with COVID more than a year ago, and they continue to experience symptoms.

This is the distribution of the symptoms that people are complaining about (see slide below).

This is the percent of individuals out of those 17 that are complaining of each of these symptoms.

And those in blue are the most common ones…”

NOTE:

  • If you’d like to participate in this clinical trial see HERE.
  • More on Dr. Guzman (Link); Follow her on Twitter: @EdmarieGV

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