Long-covid air hunger ness in 2026?
I recently read this article: "Long COVID and Breathlessness: Understanding Post-COVID Dyspnea" and for the first time since my covid diagnosis, I felt like someone was accurately describing what I experience every day.
I am 26 years old and I live in Italy. I was first diagnosed with COVID in 2021, and the breathlessness never went away. About four months ago I started practicing Buteyko breathing exercises, and that has made a real difference in how I handle the acute peaks of air hunger. I can manage them now in a way I couldn't before. But the overall symptoms are still there, every single day. I have gotten used to them the way you get used to any body dysfunction: you adapt, you work around it, you stop expecting it to go away. What scares me more than the daily discomfort is what this condition is doing to my body over the long term.
Is anyone experiencing similiar disease in 2026? I would be grateful for any guidance you can offer, or for referrals to doctors or researchers who might be able to help on these specifc aspects:
- Getting a diagnosis. In Italy, I have gone through the standard battery of tests across pneumologists/cardiologist and everything comes back normal. The article explains that this is quite common but apparently is still an open question: they mention about a xenon test which apparently is not so easy to perform in Europe: is there any similar test you would recommend to do?
- Getting an actual therapy. I practice pacing, I do Buteyko, I manage my energy envelope. These help, but they are coping strategies, not treatments. I want to know if you guys are following any specific medical treatment that is giving you any benefit or if you know clinics/research groups with active focus on such treatments.
- Staying connected to future developments. This feels like a very niche area of medicine. I do not know how many people worldwide are actually affected by post-COVID. I do not know how much attention and funding this receives in medical research, or whether it is considered a serious enough problem to attract sustained scientific effort. If you suffer from this disease, how are you following recent developments on this topic?
Any personal experience or recommendation is VERY welcome. Thank you for your time reading this.