Investigating interactions between physiological, cognitive, and behavioural variables in people experiencing long COVID

Some people with COVID-19 have symptoms that last months after the infection. This is called long COVID. People with long COVID report fatigue and have reduced tolerance to exercise and day-to-day physical activity. We do not yet fully understand why this is, making it difficult to treat.

One possible reason is that long COVID changes the way muscles are active, making it more difficult to perform certain activities or making people feel more tired after activity. In this study, we will measure how muscles, and the nerve cells that control muscles, are working in people with and without long COVID, to investigate this.

Long COVID is associated with changes in mood, including anxiety and depression. We know that the way a person feels can affect how their body works; if we feel anxious, we may tense our muscles and use them in a different way, and depression is linked to fatigue. This link may play an important role in the ability of people with long COVID to perform physical activity. We will examine how people with long COVID think, feel, and behave, examining if this is related to how their muscles are active.

Participants will be asked to perform muscle contractions. Sometimes, they will be asked to perform a mental concentration task at the same time. This can make people feel stressed or anxious for a short time (~10 min) before these feelings quickly resolve. We will examine how muscle and nerve cell activity are related to feelings of stress and anxiety, and their illness plus their health behaviours.  Long COVID is a new condition with question marks about how it should be treated. This study will help us to develop new or adapt existing treatments for people with long COVID, to enable them to perform day-to-day physical activities without fatigue.