Ziyad Al-Aly: Illuminating Long Covid
· 41 min
Episode Ziyad Al-Aly: Illuminating Long Covid
Few, if any, physician researchers have done more to understand the long-term impact of Covid than Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a professor, nephrologist, and epidemiologist along with his team at Washington University, St. Louis. Here is the transcript (with links to the audio) of our conversation that was recorded one 7 September 2023.
Eric Topol (00:00):
Welcome to Ground Truths, and this podcast is a special one for me. I get to meet professor Dr. Ziyad Ali for the first time, even though we've been communicating for years. So welcome, Ziyad.
Ziyad Al-Aly (00:15):
Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's really a delight and pleasure and an honor to be with you here today. So thank you. Thank you for the invitation, and most importantly, thank you for all the stuff that you do and you've been doing over the past several years, communicating science to the whole world, especially during the pandemic and enormously grateful for all your effort.
Background in Lebanon, the move to Wash U., and Epidemiology
Eric Topol (00:33):
Well, you're too kind and we're going to get into your work, which is more than formidable. But before I do that, because you have been a leading light in the pandemic and understanding, especially through the large veterans affairs population, the largest healthcare system in the United States, the toll of covid. But before we touch on that a bit on your background first, you're a young guy. You haven't even hit 50 yet, my goodness. Right. And you grew up in Lebanon, as I understand it, and you were already coding when you were age 14, I think, right? Pretty wild. And then perhaps the death of your father at a young age of multiple myeloma had a significant impact on your choice to go into medicine. Is that right?
Ziyad Al-Aly (01:28):
Yeah, that's how it is. So I grew up in Lebanon, and when I was growing up, the computer revolution at that time was happening and all of a sudden in my surroundings, there's these people who have these Commodore 64. So I decided that I wanted one. I asked my parents to get me one. They got me one. I learned coding at that age, and my passion was I thought I wanted to do then why not to do computer science. And then my dad fell ill with multiple myeloma and it was an aggressive form and he required initially a lot of chemotherapy and then subsequently hospitalizations. I do remember vividly visiting him in the hospital and then connected with the profession of medicine. I was not on that track. I didn't really, that's not all my youth. I wanted to be a coder. I wanted to be a computer scientist. I wanted to do basically work with computers all my life. That's what my passion was. And then redirected all that energy to medicine.
Eric Topol (02:32):
Well, you sure did it well. And you graduated from one of the top medical schools, universities at American University of Beirut, and came to St. Louis where you basically have for now 24 years or so, went on to train in medicine and nephrology and became a leading light before the pandemic. You didn't know it yet, I guess, but you were training to be a pandemic researcher because you had already made the link back in 2016, as far as I know, between these protein pump inhibitors and kidney disease later, cardiovascular disease and upper GI cancers. Can you tell us, was that your first big finding in your work in epidemiology?
Ziyad Al-Aly (03:22):
Yeah, we started doing epi. I started doing epidemiology or clinical epi right after fellowship, trained with mentors and subsequently developed my own groups and my own funding. And initially our initial work was in pharmaco-epidemiology. We were very, very interested in figuring out how do we leverage this big data to try to understand the long-term side effects of medication, which was really not available in clinical trials. Most clinical trials for these things track them for maybe 30 days or at most for few months. And really long-term risk profile of these…
Links in the notes 13
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/tmtJtFsQ7FaODoaPkH-5z7U71lFhDJuzA8xarsbh129pFfPT6uhUsRblAaB0U4YGb0FGkh8CyhS7OJyxskbUm5XP4SU?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=0.6
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/eGpbg0Tg-hOzJVrj0Krryn6CyQm-w-ysxynaGn1A1EqjLojAOEm2ExlzNUu_WaX8hU5-n5xk1oMeWocZCT3gs2nxB5o?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=15.87
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/A_TfXJFjznDb1lytqBaHIfJECOZzt0Z69tlJWqI724k9q5m3rlE8kkPtqVL0gdhE-3jF6RAjpWEsAzeK4FFGptrbDzg?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=33.54
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/GlSaSQbMEzIgpu61IVaZk_HPEPutDZ5jtyqyzwbTVM0HwYuZUfJyN9pRav4OoA_epHRRvxSzQ0SmogR-9-BWfx61T28?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=88.53
- https://outlook.wustl.edu/real-world-reflections/
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/Dobee4V2DyxdZYD7Cg3EfloJeTQHJ39s5_k6CXHOcCDFLa3d-4Ymu_MJMb0BrJk3GFe6bxq5mx4NZQP4lzBMDwOS_Vc?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=152.4
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/05SKi_9sv82gpD4mXBhbt2uVeT1cvccYXXA6vgiGpg9UsBv0cWxVqv0nX7fXbePShrV_DE_VHXcFSi2uBW9TQQLywbI?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=202.15
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/1xl5B-Lk26Vm7GNIuYBlz8aF-NQ624RANfRY3rI6KBUZcNOBz5Ynrj4UlUNbj9wDgh9yxwKliVtf7jSR6JYTV2MWR6c?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=277.54
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/vtz-YX6zLc8P9MY8ZLpxyvRp-Viy6zu9oGeYaxxLrX71Rhk4C6n15zBn4j9rx8RIoLMn7H25ogHErUrLV7MWi-Sefvg?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=318.49
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/ubDhaokjr9doCVdRSQADB20wEJj-a1rhn4vRdK1MPB-oDiwQEs5XhpBzOxIbia8NAB3e2-Mz9wu09Z8dZRkMzvRUP4U?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=371.63
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/wo8gu_WeS9MSsWm7vyZJG9jyjibw_qd7orWTKz7MvC03nL7qAmj9fTBZ9M6tC_W6DgbUTU_OH5p1XYNvPLKBKWlero4?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=407.32
- https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/pqtTwDfxTPa-h-9tSO_HtDFBFH2EHZ0cIyT4sQPRBL0ZroyEKklWUfEKqW1SdpolqbxSwyWccKwgu6wKlLyXjflL3Gk?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=459.71
- https://erictopol.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4
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