Coping with the Current and Ongoing Impact of Long COVID

Featuring Pulmonologist
Alejandro Comellas, MD

 

Description

Listen in on this important conversation with pulmonary leader Alejandro Comellas, MD and Susan Wood, PhD, CEO of VIDA. In this exchange with Dr. Comellas, we explore the origins, progress and learnings at Iowa’s post-Covid clinic, recent findings of air trapping in “long-Covid” patients (using vDPM analysis from VIDA), and the prospects of new therapies for long COVID.

Highlights

Dr. Comellas discusses the importance of measuring air trapping (using VIDA’s vDPM technique) to better understand small airway disease. 

“Quantification of the imaging was able to provide us a lot of information about the degree of involvement (of the small airways).”

What surprised you in your Long COVID study?

“(With imaging) We were able to detect changes that were not being reflected yet in pulmonary function testing (PFTs).”

Watch the Full Webinar

Access the full webinar for much more, including:

  • Is the air trapping persistent? Does is vary by the COVID variant?
  • Why do so many lung diseases start in the small airways?
  • How big of a problem is Long COVID? How busy is the clinic?

Speaker Bios

Alejandro Comellas, MD

Clinical Professor of Internal Medicine – Pulmonary
Critical Care and Occupational Medicine
University of Iowa
Associate Editor for the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine

Alejandro Comellas, MD is Clinical Professor of Internal Medicine-Pulmonary, Critical Care and Occupational Medicine at the University of Iowa Health Care System.

Dr. Comellas obtained his Medical Degree from Central University of Venezuela. He moved the USA in 1998 where he completed his Internal Medicine Residency in 2001 at Northwestern University. He continued in.  the same institution for his Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship. In 2006 he became Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. In 2008, he moved to the University of Iowa as a faculty member in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Occupational Medicine. He continued with his research on acute lung injury and expanded to environmental effects on airway innate immunity. He also became in the site PI for COPDGene and Spiromics. In 2017 he was named Director of the ICTS Clinical Research Unit at the University of Iowa.