/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisaradio/DUR65WZ4WJAWHO5FV6E6HHQKPU.jpg "One in eight people with COVID-19 develops prolonged symptoms | Present")
Madrid
One in eight adults (specifically, 12.7%) infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes covid-19, experiences long-term symptoms of this disease. This is suggested by a study carried out by twenty Dutch researchers, mostly from the University Medical Center of Groningen (The Netherlands), and published this Friday in the journal The Lancet.
This work offers one of the first comparisons of long-term symptoms after covid-19 infection -often called persistent covid- with respect to a non-sick population, in addition to measuring symptoms in individuals before and after infection. The inclusion of uninfected populations allows a more accurate prediction of the prevalence of persistent covid symptoms, as well as a better identification of its main effects.
“There is an urgent need for data reporting the scale and extent of long-term symptoms experienced by some patients after COVID-19 illness,” said Judith Rosmalen of the University of Groningen and lead author of the study. Rosmalen adds that, “however, most previous research on persistent covid has not analyzed the frequency of these symptoms in people who have not been diagnosed with covid-19 nor have they analyzed the symptoms of individual patients before the diagnosis of covid. -19”.
Symptoms of prolonged COVID
“Our study approach looks at symptoms that are most often associated with prolonged COVID, including breathing problems, fatigue, and loss of taste and/or smell, both before a COVID-19 diagnosis and in people who don’t. have been diagnosed with covid-19. This method allows us to take into account pre-existing symptoms and symptoms in uninfected people to offer an improved working definition for persistent COVID and provide a reliable estimate of the probability that COVID-19 will last in the general population.” .
The researchers collected data from online questionnaires on 23 symptoms commonly associated with persistent covid. The questions were sent 24 times to the same people between March 2020 and August 2021, meaning that participants who had COVID-19 during that time were infected with the alpha variant of SARS-CoV-2 or earlier variants.
Most of the data was collected before the launch of the covid-19 vaccine in the Netherlands, so the number of vaccinated participants was too small to analyze in the study. Participants were registered as sick with covid-19 if they had a positive test or a medical diagnosis of the disease. Of the 76,422 participants, a total of 4,231 (5.5%) people surveyed who had covid-19 underwent 8,462 controls taking into account gender, age and the time of completion of the questionnaires that indicated a diagnosis of covid-19 The researchers found that several symptoms were new or more severe between three and five months after contracting covid-19, compared with symptoms before a diagnosis of the disease and with the control group (not sick), which suggests that these symptoms can be seen as the core symptoms of persistent covid.
The central symptoms recorded were chest pain, shortness of breath, pain when breathing, muscle pain, loss of taste and/or smell, tingling in the hands/feet, lump in the throat, alternating sensations of hot and cold, heaviness in the arms and/or or legs and general tiredness. The severity of these symptoms stabilized at three months after infection and did not decrease further.
Other symptoms
Other symptoms that did not significantly increase three to five months after a COVID-19 diagnosis included headache, itchy eyes, dizziness, back pain and nausea. “These core symptoms have important implications for future research, as these symptoms can be used to distinguish between post-Covid-19 condition and non-Covid-19 related symptoms,” said Aranka Ballering, first author of the study.
Of study participants who had pre-COVID-19 symptom data, the researchers found that 21.4% (381 of 1,782) of participants positive for the disease, compared with 8.7% (361 of 4,130) in the non-diseased group, experienced at least an increase in central symptoms of moderate severity at least three months after infection.
This implies that, in 12.7% of covid-19 patients, new or severely increased symptoms three months after illness can be attributed to SARS-CoV-2 infection. The authors acknowledge some limitations in the study, which included patients infected with the alpha or earlier variants of SARS-CoV-2 and did not have data on people infected with the delta or omicron variants.
Furthermore, due to asymptomatic infection, the prevalence of covid-19 in the study may be underestimated. Another limitation is that, since the beginning of the data collection, other symptoms – brain fog, for example – have been identified as potentially relevant to a definition of persistent covid, but the research did not look at these symptoms.
“Future research should include mental health symptoms (for example, depression and anxiety symptoms), along with additional post-infectious symptoms that we were unable to assess in this study (such as mental confusion, insomnia, and malaise). We were unable to investigate what might cause any of the symptoms seen after covid-19 in this study, but we hope that future research can inform the mechanisms involved,” Rosmalen concluded.
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