“Understanding Long Covid: Prevalence, Symptoms, and Treatment for Women”

For some, the long Covid is endless. The page of the epidemic seems turned, but not for everyone. The prolonged symptoms of Covid-19 continue to undermine the health of many patients in Lorraine. At the Nancy CHRU alone, around fifty consultations take place each month. New patients, but also older ones, followed, sometimes, since the spring of 2020.

While the World Health Organization (WHO) has just raised its highest level of alert on Covid, they are still battling the repercussions of their infection: fatigue, impaired concentration, abdominal pain, digestive disorders, headaches , muscle cramps, shortness of breath… and psychological repercussions. These symptoms cause anxiety, post-traumatic stress syndromes, depressive disorders, according to the High Authority of Health.

Since 2021, it has regularly updated documentary resources for healthcare professionals. Several sheets have just been updated, those concerning “psychiatric disorders and psychological aspects associated with prolonged symptoms of Covid-19” and those dealing with physiotherapy care “relating to progressive retraining at effort “.

In a note from July 2022, Public Health France published the first results of a study on the prevalence of “post-Covid-19 conditions” or “Covid long”. We can read there that “on the scale of the French population, post-Covid-19 affection would concern 2.06 million people over the age of 18 in France”, mainly women (32.8%), working people (32.3%) and people who have been hospitalized (38%). The National Public Health Agency states: “20% of people who had an infection with SARS-CoV-2 still presented the criteria for a ‘post-Covid-19 condition’ 18 months after infection” .

It is now accepted that the long Covid is not a figment of the imagination.

A majority of women

Dr Alexandra Bruyère, co-responsible for the CapCov service at the Nancy CHRU with Dr François Goehringer, the regional support center for patients with long Covid opened in September 2022, sees this every day. “We mainly treat patients infected during the first wave, around March-April 2020, and people who were infected with the Omicron variant in 2022. Generally, the latter tend to recover more quickly and have less symptoms. There are two reasons for this: firstly, Omicron has been less virulent than its predecessors. Two, most individuals were vaccinated upon arrival.

“Vaccination reduced the number of symptoms and allowed better recovery,” says Alexandra Bruyère. For the others, the virulence of the first infections without vaccine protection undoubtedly played a role. At the CHRU too, patients are mostly female patients. “We have 80% women, continues Alexandra Bruyère. We also have patients with a pulmonary history (asthma type, etc.), an allergic background, etc. “Before making a diagnosis of” long Covid “, doctors proceed by elimination. “We start by checking that there was indeed an infection, then that there were initial symptoms in favor of Covid infection, that there is a persistence of several troublesome symptoms for more than three months. after the initial infection and that other pathologies are not involved”, lists Alexandra Bruyère. The trace of the virus is found thanks to the presence of antibodies.

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