Antihistamines may provide relief for long COVID sufferers

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Long COVID sufferers could return to almost their normal daily activities after taking antihistamines daily, a recent study suggests.
• Though the evidence is anecdotal, similar outcomes have been observed in previous studies.
• There are currently no evidence-based treatments for long COVID but taking antihistamines could help.

A recently published case report suggests that long COVID sufferers could return to almost their normal daily activities after taking antihistamines daily.

Long COVID is a chronic condition when patients who are infected with the virus have persistent symptoms.

“Most patients tell us that providers have not recommended anything that has helped,” said co-author Melissa Pinto, associate professor at the University of California, Irvine Sue and Bill Gross School of Nursing. 

Two healthy middle-aged women who suffered from long COVID but noted considerable improvement after taking antihistamines became the focus of the case report.

“This is the experience of two people,” Pinto said. “It gives an idea of when they took antihistamines, how long it took them to have relief, what type of combinations they used and what were the dosing regiments.”

In the first case, a relatively healthy white woman in her 40s contracted Covid-19 and suffered from an array of symptoms.

Months after, “brain fog” and general fatigue, persisted. Long COVID affected her at work in the healthcare sector; she also couldn’t exercise as frequently or as vigorously as before infection.

Six months out, she took antihistamine after eating cheese, which triggered a dairy allergy. She noticed a considerable improvement in both brain fog and fatigue the morning after. Long COVID symptoms returned when she didn’t take Benadryl for three days but once she did, her symptoms improved again.

Under the care of a doctor, she was prescribed a second antihistamine and reported a 90% return of her pre-COVID daily life and fully returned to work.

“We suspect that long COVID may have subtypes and this particular subtype, it may actually target these types of symptoms,” Pinto said.

The same happened with the second closely examined case. More than a year after the patient was infected with COVID-19, she took an antihistamine and, like the first patient, experienced a marked improvement of her brain fog and fatigue.

Two months after a set dosage under a doctor’s care, she is reporting a 95% return to pre-COVID functioning and has been able to resume exercising.

Antihistamines aren’t approved by the FDA to treat long COVID. Clinical trials haven’t been conducted to establish the efficacy of such medication and at what dosage levels.

“I’m not instructing patients in any way to use this report as a guide to dose or anything like that,” Pinto said. “I actually encourage patients, if they’re going to try antihistamines, to work with their provider.”

Source: Fox News