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Generating clinical evidence for treatment and prevention options for long COVID

Nature Medicine (2024)Cite this article

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Long COVID is a chronic and debilitating disease affecting more than 36 million people in the European Union (EU)1. Most patients are of working age, creating a high burden on healthcare and social systems2. At present, there are no EU-approved medicines for the treatment or prevention of long COVID.

The long COVID therapeutic field is at a crossroads, with many study designs being proposed and used in ongoing clinical research. However, the lack of a standardized definition and common ICD-10 code for long COVID and the complexity of the pathophysiological mechanisms and clinical syndromes associated with the condition3 pose substantial challenges to the design of clinical trials to evaluate therapeutic and preventive approaches for these conditions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Medicines Agency, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Stephanie Buchholz, Eugenia Di Meco & Marco Cavaleri

  2. Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices, Bonn, Germany

    Stephanie Buchholz

  3. EMA Emergency Task Force, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Eugenia Di Meco, Ewa Z. Bałkowiec-Iskra, Bruno Sepodes & Marco Cavaleri

  4. Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology, Medical University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Ewa Z. Bałkowiec-Iskra

  5. The Office for Registration of Medicinal Products, Medical Devices and Biocidal Products, Warsaw, Poland

    Ewa Z. Bałkowiec-Iskra

  6. EMA Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ewa Z. Bałkowiec-Iskra & Bruno Sepodes

  7. Faculdade de Farmácia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Bruno Sepodes

Authors
  1. Stephanie Buchholz
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  2. Eugenia Di Meco
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  3. Ewa Z. Bałkowiec-Iskra
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  4. Bruno Sepodes
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  5. Marco Cavaleri
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco Cavaleri.

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The authors declare no competing interests. The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author(s) and may not be understood or quoted as being made on behalf of or reflecting the position of the regulatory agency/agencies or organizations with which the author(s) is/are employed/affiliated.

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Buchholz, S., Di Meco, E., Bałkowiec-Iskra, E.Z. et al. Generating clinical evidence for treatment and prevention options for long COVID. Nat Med (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03031-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03031-5

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