What's the justification for this recommendation? I find this really curious since I had some stomach acid issues that started during the pandemic (like, perhaps late 2020) that I assumed were stress related. I don't remember actually getting COVID in that time span (my uni was testing us every 3 days so I would have noticed if I had it around then). My primary care prescribed me famotidine for it in ~2022 which helped for a while. I still take it regularly but I did a 90 run of omeprazole last year.
Somebody linked a study showing an effect. For a bit of intuition:
A lot of the negative effects of covid are from our immune response and general long-term swelling and inflammation. Pepcid is a pretty safe histamine blocker, suppressing some of that initial broad-spectrum inflammatory response.
Recently I had a pretty bad poison oak problem, and in addition to the normal things (steroids, antibiotics, ...), the doctor strongly suggested allegra+pepcid for a similar reason.
Related, my gut instinct would be that benadryl would have similar effects on long-covid patients (though that might be hard to test given the induced drowsiness from the drug).
"However, studies have shown that famotidine is not effective in reducing mortality or improving recovery in COVID-19 patients.[38]"
Borrell B (26 April 2020). "New York clinical trial quietly tests heartburn remedy against coronavirus". Science Magazine.
A lot of Long Covid seems to be related to mitochondrial damage. You'd probably be better off getting some creatine (which is commonly available because weightlifters use it) and seeing if that helps. Creatine is at least well documented to improve mitochondrial funciton.
Because Mast cell activation syndrome is a common outcome and antihistamines can reduce the impact and gradually calm the gut inflammation process down and quite a lot of Long Covid patients feel better on it.
I'm specifically referring to long covid neurological symptoms like brain fog. Not hospitalization rates, mortality, or whatever measure of recovery most studies of severe patients would be concerned with.
