Publications

Background: It remains unknown whether and to what extent members of online long COVID-19 peer support

IMPORTANCE Evidence regarding corticosteroid use for severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is limited. OBJECTIVE To determine whether hydrocortisone improves outcome for patients with severe COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS An ongoing adaptive platform trial testing multiple interventions within multiple therapeutic domains, for example, antiviral agents, corticosteroids, or immunoglobulin. Between March 9 and June 17, 2020, 614 ...

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has affected more than seven million people worldwide, contributing to 0.4 million deaths as of June 2020. The fact that the virus uses angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE)-2 as the cell entry receptor and that hypertension as well as cardiovascular disorders frequently coexist with COVID-19 have generated considerable discussion on the ...

OBJECTIVE: To retrospectively analyse data obtained from the multi-domain assessment of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, to describe their health status at discharge, and to investigate whether subgroups of patients, more specific ICU patients and older adults (> 70 years), had more (or less) risk to experience specific impairments. METHODS: Retrospective case series in the University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium of confirmed COVID-19 ...

Background: It remains unknown whether and to what extent members of online "long COVID" peer support groups remain symptomatic and limited over time. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate symptoms in members of online long COVID peer support groups up to 6 months after the onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-related symptoms. Methods: Demographics, symptoms, health status, work productivity, functional status and health-related quality of ...

People are often exposed to fake news. Such an exposure to misleading information might lead to false memory creation. We examined whether people can form false memories for COVID-19-related fake news. Furthermore, we investigated which individual factors might predict false memory formation for fake news. In two experiments, we provided participants with two pieces of COVID-19-related fake news along with a non-probative photograph. In ...

Short-term humoral and cellular immune responses are diminished after BNT162b2 messenger ribonucleic acid coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination in COVID-19-naive nursing home residents, a population particularly vulnerable to the disease. We found both responses to decline after 4 weeks and remain lower than those of healthcare workers after 24 weeks, with an estimated half-life of the antibody response of 47 days. At 4 weeks, older ...

Purpose - Following the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), many forms of bottom-up civic action emerged as ways to collectively "flatten the curve" and tackle the crisis. In this paper, the authors examine to what extent local online and offline social integration contributes to civic participation, above and beyond typical predictors such as news consumption and civic talk. Design/methodology/approach - An online survey was ...

This work presents a joint spatial modeling framework to improve estimation of the spatial distribution of the latent COVID-19 incidence in Belgium, based on test-confirmed COVID-19 cases and crowd-sourced symptoms data as reported in a large-scale online survey. Correction is envisioned for stochastic dependence between the survey's response rate and spatial COVID-19 incidence, commonly known as preferential sampling, but not found significant. ...

Background: There is no data regarding COVID-19 in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) patients in Latin America. Objective: The objective of this study was to describe the clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients included in RELACOEM, a LATAM registry of MS and NMOSD patients infected with COVID-19. Methods: RELACOEM is a longitudinal, strictly observational registry of MS and NMOSD patients who ...