Today, we’re launching a new in-app research study into reinfections.
It’s long been reported by people with Long Covid and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) that new acute infections, including Covid infections, can have a significant impact on long-term symptoms.
We’ve partnered with the incredible Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC) to help understand this phenomenon.
Partnering with Patient-Led Research Collaborative
PLRC is a non-profit, patient-led organisation that has published some of the most cited work in Long Covid, including ‘Characterizing long COVID in an international cohort: 7 months of symptoms and their impact’ in 2021 and ‘Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations’ in 2023.
The research they have published and funded has been some of the most impactful to date.
Last year they began investigating reinfections, and plan to publish their findings later this year.
Gaining a deeper insight with Visible’s community dataset
With more than 60,000 people with energy-limiting illness already tracking symptoms and biometrics with Visible every day, we have an unprecedented opportunity to provide an even larger and more comprehensive dataset to dive even deeper into the data to answer crucial questions like:
- How frequent are reinfections for those living with long term symptoms?
- What is the impact of these reinfections on symptoms and recovery?
- Does the impact of Covid infections differ from the impact of other infections on quality of life and health metrics for people with ME or Long Covid?
- How do medications you're on during reinfection influence health outcomes?
We’re excited to partner with PLRC on this research to bring more visibility to these conditions.
Tracking infections in the Evening Check-in
If you’d like to participate in this research, you can opt-in to share your anonymized data with PLRC from within the Visible app. Simply go to the Research section in the Community tab to enrol.
Once enrolled, your evening check-in will then include a new tracker for ‘infection’ allowing you to record any days that you experience an infection and record the infection type, if you know it.
Enroll into other research studies before they close
Visible now has a total of 4 research studies live. If you’d like to take part in more research there are also studies into the menstrual cycle and biometrics, with fantastic Long Covid and ME researchers, including Viki Male and Christian Morgenstern from Imperial College London and David Putrino from Mt Sinai.
These three researchers have now started analyzing the anonmymized data shared by thousands of people over the past few weeks. Now is a great time to enrol and help provide them with an even more powerful dataset.
Together we can move the science forward, and help make invisible illnesses, visible.
Onwards,
Harry
