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Foto: CC0 Gerd Altmann via Pexels
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One in eight people who become infected with corona will end up with Long Covid as a result, large-scale population survey in the Netherlands has shown.
In other words: they have long-term complaints. This concerns, for example, chest pain, loss of smell and taste, shortness of breath, fatigue or muscle pain.
The research, the results of which were published on Friday in the scientific journal The Lancet, was done by, among others, UMC Groningen and Radboudumc. The researchers analyzed the health data of nearly 13,000 Dutch people who regularly completed questionnaires about their health.
The investigation began in March 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic began. The researchers compared the complaints of people who contracted corona with the complaints they had before they became infected. The complaints have also been compared with those of people who did not have corona in the same period.
In this way the researchers could take into account changes in complaints due to other causes, explains lead researcher Judith Rosmalen of the UMCG. “For example, due to the change of seasons, because people developed new diseases, or because living conditions changed due to the pandemic and the measures. That is why data from the general population is indispensable.”
Rosmalen now wants to further investigate the causes of Long Covid and to what extent people with long-term Covid can still function, for example at work. “We also ask what care people have received and how they experience it,” says the professor of psychosomatics. “With all the data, care pathways are developed to provide patients with the right care and to calculate the social costs, both through medical costs and productivity losses.”
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