After recovering, people report changes in attention, debilitating headaches, brain fog, muscular weakness, and, perhaps most commonly, insomnia. “We’re seeing referrals from doctors because the disease itself affects the nervous system,” she says. But more perplexing symptoms have been arising specifically among people who have recovered from COVID-19. Many people’s sleep continues to be disrupted by predictable pandemic anxieties. In recent months, however, Salas has watched a more curious pattern emerge. “In the summer, we were calling it ‘COVID-somnia,’” Salas says. Roughly three-quarters of people in the United Kingdom have had a change in their sleep during the pandemic, according to the British Sleep Society, and less than half are getting refreshing sleep. Indeed, patterns of sleep disruption have played out around the world. Rachel Salas, one of the team’s neurologists, says she initially thought this surge in sleep disorders was merely the result of all the anxieties that come with a devastating global crisis: worries about health, the economic impact, and isolation. Throughout the pandemic, the department of neurology at Johns Hopkins University has been flooded with consultation requests for people suffering from insomnia. Better appreciating the ties between immunity and the nervous system could be central to understanding COVID-19-and to preventing it. The virus is capable of altering the delicate processes within our nervous system, in many cases in unpredictable ways, sometimes creating long-term symptoms. In fact, several mysteries of how COVID-19 works converge on the question of how the disease affects our sleep, and how our sleep affects the disease. He and others suggest that the real issue at play may not be melatonin at all, but the function it most famously controls: sleep. Its apparent benefit to COVID-19 patients could simply be a spurious correlation-or, perhaps, a signal alerting us to something else that is actually improving people’s outcomes. Like any substance capable of slowing the central nervous system, melatonin is not a trifling addition to the body’s chemistry. Yet Cheng emphasizes that he’s not recommending that. People could start taking it immediately. Unlike experimental drugs such as remdesivir and antibody cocktails, melatonin is widely available in the United States as an over-the-counter dietary supplement. If melatonin actually proves to help people, it would be the cheapest and most readily accessible medicine to counter COVID-19. Few other treatments are receiving so much research attention. When President Donald Trump was flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for COVID-19 treatment, his doctors prescribed-in addition to a plethora of other experimental therapies-melatonin.Įight clinical trials are currently ongoing, around the world, to see if these melatonin correlations bear out. In October, a study at Columbia University found that intubated patients had better rates of survival if they received melatonin. Other researchers noticed similar patterns. People taking it had significantly lower odds of developing COVID-19, much less dying of it.
In results published last month, melatonin continued to stand out. For months, he and colleagues pieced together the data from thousands of patients who were seen at his medical center. Essentially, it acts as a moderator to help keep our self-protective responses from going haywire-which happens to be the basic problem that can quickly turn a mild case of COVID-19 into a life-threatening scenario.Ĭheng decided to dig deeper.
They noted that, in addition to melatonin’s well-known effects on sleep, it plays a part in calibrating the immune system. “It was very preliminary,” he told me recently-a small study in the early days before COVID-19 even had a name, when anything that might help was deemed worth sharing.Īfter he published his research, though, Cheng heard from scientists around the world who thought there might be something to it.
Each night, as darkness falls, it shoots out of our brain’s pineal glands and into our blood, inducing sleep. Its most familiar role is in the regulation of our circadian rhythms.
Melatonin, best known as the sleep hormone, wasn’t an obvious factor in halting a pandemic.
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