WEDNESDAY, May 26, 2021 (HealthDay News) – If you wind up in hospital with COVID-19 infection, there’s a good chance you might still have symptoms months later, researchers report.
More than 70% of these patients were plagued by a wide range of persistent health problems, the investigators found.
“We completely ignored the long-term consequences of contracting this virus from the start,” said lead author of the study, Dr. Steven Goodman, Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health and Medicine at Stanford University. “People have been told that this was all in their heads. The question now is not whether this is real, but how big the problem is.”
To find out, his team analyzed 45 studies published between January 2020 and March 2021. The studies included more than 9,700 COVID-19 patients. Of these, 83% had been hospitalized.
They found that 72.5% of study participants said they still had at least one of 84 persistent symptoms or clinical signs, the most common being fatigue (40%), shortness of breath (36%), difficulty sleeping (29%), inability to Concentration (25%), depression and anxiety (20%) and general pain and discomfort (20%).
Other problems reported by patients included loss of taste and smell, memory loss, chest pain, and fever.
Persistent symptoms were defined as those that lasted at least 60 days after diagnosis, onset of symptoms or hospital admission, or at least 30 days after recovery from acute illness or hospital discharge.
If any of these patients require ongoing care, they could be an immense public health burden, Goodman said.
“If something on the order of 70% of those who have moderate to severe COVID-19 illness have persistent symptoms, that’s a large number,” Goodman said in a Stanford press release. “It is amazing how many symptoms are part of what is now called the long-term COVID.”
The study was published on May 26th in the journal JAMA Network Open.
“We did this study because there were a lot of news comments and scientific articles talking about long-term COVID symptoms,” said Tahmina Nasserie, lead author of the study, a PhD student in epidemiology at Stanford.
“But few had delved deep enough into the scientific evidence to show the full range of how long it lasted and who it affected,” she noted in the press release.
“The numbers are very shocking, especially when you are tired and breathless,” said Nasserie. “These were quite debilitating symptoms, with some people reporting difficulty climbing stairs.”
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is more concerned with post-COVID conditions.
SOURCE: Stanford University, press release, May 26, 2021
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