A study
of tens of thousands of people in Scotland found that one in 20 people who had
been sick with
COVID-19 reported not recovering at all, and another four in 10
said they had not fully recovered from their infections many months later.
اضافة اعلان
The authors of the
study, published on October 12 in the journal Nature Communications, tried to
home in on the long-term risks of COVID by comparing the frequency of symptoms
in people with and without previous COVID diagnoses.
People with
previous symptomatic
COVID infections reported certain persistent symptoms,
such as breathlessness, palpitations, and confusion or difficulty
concentrating, at a rate roughly three times as high as uninfected people in
surveys from six to 18 months later, the study found. Those patients also
experienced elevated risks of more than 20 other symptoms relating to the
heart, respiratory health, muscle aches, mental health, and the sensory system.
The findings
strengthened calls from scientists for more expansive care options for long
COVID patients in the US and elsewhere, while also offering some good news.
The study did not
identify greater risks of long-term problems in people with asymptomatic
coronavirus infections. It also found, in a much more limited subset of
participants who had been given at least one dose of COVID vaccine before their
infections, that vaccination appeared to help reduce, if not eliminate the risk
of some long COVID symptoms.
People with severe
initial COVID cases were at higher risk of long-term problems, the study found.
“The beauty of
this study is they have a control group, and they can isolate the proportion of
symptomatology that is attributable to COVID infection,” said Dr Ziyad Al-Aly,
chief of research at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical
epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in
the research.
“It also tracks
with the broader idea that long COVID is truly a multisystem disorder,” Al-Aly
said, one that resides “not only in the brain, not only in the heart — it’s all
of the above”.
COVID can appear differently in different individuals, and it can have more than one impact on your life
Jill Pell, a
professor of public health at the
University of Glasgow who led the research,
said the findings reinforced the importance of long COVID patients being
offered support that extends beyond healthcare and also addresses needs related
to jobs, education, poverty, and disability.
“It told us that
COVID can appear differently in different individuals, and it can have more
than one impact on your life,” Pell said. “Any approach to supporting people
has to be, firstly, personalized and also holistic. The answer doesn’t just lie
within the health care sector.”
Long COVID refers
to a constellation of problems that can plague patients for months or longer
after an infection. Over the last year, researchers have given more attention
to understanding the daunting aftereffects as the number of COVID cases
exploded and health systems learned to better manage the initial stages of an
infection.
US government
estimates have indicated that between 7.7 million and 23 million people in the
US could have long COVID.
Globally, “the
condition is devastating people’s lives and livelihoods”, Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, wrote in an
article on October 12 for The Guardian. He called on all countries to devote
“immediate and sustained action equivalent to its scale”.
The authors of the
study in Scotland tracked 33,000 people who had tested positive for the virus
starting in April 2020 and 63,000 who had never been diagnosed with COVID. In
six-month intervals, those people were asked about any symptoms they had,
including tiredness, muscle aches, chest pain, and neurological problems, and
about any difficulties with daily life.
By comparing the
frequency of those problems between infected and uninfected people, the
researchers tried to overcome a challenge that many other long COVID
researchers have confronted: how to ascribe less specific symptoms to COVID
when those problems are also common in the general population and may be
prevalent in the midst of a pandemic.
Several of the
most common long COVID symptoms identified in the study were also reported by
one-fifth to one-third of participants who had never been infected, the study
found. But symptoms were significantly more common in people who had previously
had COVID: Those participants were more likely to report 24 of the 26 symptoms
tracked by the study.
Of those with
previous COVID cases, six percent said on their most recent follow-up survey
that they had not recovered at all and 42 percent said that they had only
partly recovered.
Pell said that she
was still studying the trajectory of long COVID symptoms over the months and
years since an infection. But the new study opened a small window to that
question. In one group of previously infected patients, about 13 percent of
people said that their symptoms had improved over time, while about 11 percent
said they had deteriorated.
“Some do resolve
over time,” Al-Aly said, “but also there’s a good number of people who remain
symptomatic with a bunch of manifestations over longer time periods.”
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