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| A recent study revealed that almost half of new crown patients have not recovered completely. |
A Scottish study of tens of thousands of people found that one in 20 people with COVID-19 reported no improvement at all, and another 40 percent said they hadn't fully recovered months after being infected.
The authors of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications , sought to understand the long-term risk of COVID-19 by comparing the frequency of symptoms in people who had previously been diagnosed with the disease and those who had not .
The study found that in surveys six to 18 months later, symptomatic infected people reported certain persistent symptoms, such as difficulty breathing, heart palpitations, confusion or difficulty concentrating, about three times as often as uninfected people . These patients were also at elevated risk for more than 20 other symptoms related to heart, respiratory health, muscle pain, mental health and sensory systems.
The findings add to scientists' calls for broader care options for long-term COVID-19 patients in the U.S. and other countries, and some good news.
The study did not find that people with asymptomatic COVID-19 infection were at greater risk of long-term problems. The study also found that in a more limited subset of participants, they had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine prior to infection, which appeared to help reduce — or eliminate — some of the risk of long-term COVID-19 symptoms.
Early COVID-19 cases with severe symptoms were at higher risk of long-term problems, the study found.
"What's great about this study is that they had a control group and they could isolate the proportion of symptoms that were attributable to COVID-19 infection," said Dr. Ziad Al-Ali, director of research and development at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs St. Clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He was not involved in the study.
"It also echoes a broader view that long-term COVID-19 is indeed a multisystem disorder," Al-Ali said, a disease that "doesn't just affect the brain, it doesn't just affect the heart, it affects every organ."
Gil Pell, a professor of public health at the University of Glasgow, who led the study, said the findings reaffirmed the importance of supporting long-term COVID-19 patients beyond just medical care, but also addressing issues related to employment, education, poverty and disability. related needs.
"What it tells us is that COVID-19 can show different symptoms in different people, and it can have more than one impact on a person's life," Pell said. "Anything that works for people must first and foremost be individualized and comprehensive. The answer does not lie solely in the healthcare sector."
Long-term covid-19 refers to a series of problems that plague patients for months or longer after infection. Last year, as infections surged and health systems learned how to better handle the early stages of infection, researchers began to pay more attention to and understand the dreaded aftereffects.
The U.S. government estimates that the number of long-term COVID-19 patients in the United States ranges from 7.7 million to 23 million.
Globally, "the situation is seriously affecting people's lives and livelihoods," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in an article in The Guardian on Wednesday . He called on all countries to "immediately take corresponding and sustainable measures".
The authors of the Scottish study followed 33,000 COVID-positive people from April 2020, plus 63,000 people who had never been diagnosed with COVID-19. Every six months, the men were asked about their symptoms, including fatigue, muscle pain, chest pain and nerve problems, as well as any difficulties they were experiencing in their daily lives.
By comparing the frequency of these problems in infected and uninfected people, the researchers sought to answer a conundrum that many other long-term COVID-19 researchers have encountered: When these health problems are also common in the general population and may be prevalent in the epidemic, How to attribute less specific symptoms to COVID-19.
The study found that between one-fifth and one-third of the participants who had never been infected with COVID-19 also reported several of the most common long-term COVID-19 symptoms summarized in the study. But those symptoms were significantly more common in people who had been infected with COVID-19: These participants were more likely to report 24 of the 26 symptoms tracked in the study.
Of those who had been infected with COVID-19, 6% said at their most recent follow-up survey that they had not recovered at all; while 42% said they had not fully recovered.
Pell said she is still studying the trajectory of long-term COVID-19 symptoms months and years after infection. But the new study opens a small crack at the problem. Among a group of former COVID-19 patients, about 13% said their symptoms had improved over time, and about 11% said their symptoms had worsened.
"Some (symptoms) do fade over time," Pell said, "but there are also a lot of people who have symptoms for a long time."
Only a small proportion of study participants -- about 4 percent -- had been vaccinated before becoming infected, and many others received only one dose.
"We're very dependent on vaccinations now," Pell said. "It does provide some protection, but it's not absolute."
Women, the elderly and those living in impoverished areas also face more severe consequences of infection. The same is true for people with pre-existing health problems, including respiratory disease and depression.
Nine out of 10 study participants were white, making it relatively difficult to determine how and why long-term COVID-19 risk differs among different racial and ethnic groups.
As health systems across the world struggle to get back up and running after a recent surge in COVID-19 infections while facing an onslaught of patients with flu and other respiratory illnesses, more resources are needed to treat patients affected by earlier COVID-19 infections, scientists say. many.
"Our system wasn't ready," Pell said.
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