A study of tens of thousands of people in Scotland found that 1 in 20 people who contracted Covid19 had not recovered and a further 4 in 10 patients were still not fully recovered from the infection many months later.
The authors of the study, published last Wednesday (12) in the journal Nature Communications, attempted to identify the longterm risks of Covid by comparing the frequency of symptoms in people with and without a prior diagnosis of the disease.
People with previous symptomatic Covid infections were three times more likely than people who had not contracted Covid to report certain persistent symptoms, such as shortness of breath, palpitations and confusion or difficulty concentrating, in surveys conducted 6 to 18 months after infection. These patients also had an increased risk of more than 20 other symptoms related to heart, respiratory health, muscle pain, mental health and the sensory system.
The finding reinforces scientists’ calls for broader longterm care options for Covid patients in the United States and other countries. At the same time, it contains some good news.
The study did not identify a greater risk of longterm problems in people with asymptomatic Covid. And it turned out that in a much smaller subset of participants who had taken at least one dose of the antiCovid vaccine prior to infection, the vaccine appeared to have helped reduce the risk of some symptoms of longterm Covid, or even to eliminate .
According to the study, people with severe early Covid are at higher risk of developing longterm problems.
“The good thing about this study is that there is a control group and the scientists were able to isolate the part of the symptomatology that is due to Covid,” said Dr. Ziyad AlAly, research director of the VA St. Louis Health Care System and clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study.
“It reinforces the broader notion that longterm Covid is actually a multisystem disorder,” said AlAly, which is “not just in the brain, not just in the heart, but in all of those areas.”
Jill Pell, Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow, who led the research, said the findings reinforce the importance of patients with longterm Covid receiving support that is not limited to medical care but also needs related to Work, education, low income and physical disability.
“The study showed us that Covid can present itself differently in different people and have more than one impact on their lives,” Pell said. “Any approach to providing support must be both personalized and holistic. The answer isn’t just in the healthcare sector.”
Longterm Covid is a constellation of problems that can make life difficult for patients months or even longer after infection. Over the past 12 months, researchers have paid more attention to efforts to understand the serious aftermath as the number of Covid cases has exploded and healthcare systems have learned to better manage the early stages of infection.
The US government estimates that between 7.7 million and 23 million people in the country could have longterm illnesses from Covid.
Worldwide, the condition is “devastating people’s lives and livelihoods,” wrote World Health Organization directorgeneral Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in an article for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper. He called on all countries to give immediate and sustained attention commensurate with the scale of the problem.
The authors of the Scottish study followed 33,000 people who tested positive for the virus up to April 2020 and 63,000 people who were never diagnosed with Covid. At sixmonth intervals, these individuals were asked about symptoms such as fatigue, muscle pain, chest pain, and neurological problems, as well as difficulties in everyday life.
By comparing the frequency of these problems in infected and uninfected individuals, the scientists attempted to address a challenge faced by many other researchers who have studied longterm Covid: how to attribute less specific symptoms to Covid when these problems persist in the Generally occur population and can be spread worldwide amid a pandemic.
Some of the most common symptoms of longterm Covid identified in the study were also reported by between a fifth and a third of participants who never had Covid, the study found. But symptoms were significantly more common in people who had Covid: These participants tended to have 24 of the 26 symptoms identified by the study.
Among those who had previously had Covid, 6% said their most recent medical evaluation showed they had not recovered and 42% had only partially recovered.
Pell said he is still studying the long history of Covid symptoms in the months and years that have passed since infection. But the new study opens a small window on that question. In a group of previously infected patients, 13% of people said their symptoms had improved over time, while 11% said they had gotten worse.
“Some of the symptoms go away over time,” AlAly said, “but there are also a good number of people who remain symptomatic for a longer period of time, with varying manifestations.”
Only a small proportion of the study participants (4%) were vaccinated before contracting Covid, many of them only with a single dose.
“Today we rely heavily on vaccinations,” Pell said, “which provide some protection but not complete protection.”
Women, the elderly and people living in poorer areas face more serious aftereffects after being infected with Covid. This also applies to people with preexisting health conditions, including respiratory diseases and depression.
About 9 out of 10 study participants were white and struggling to determine how and why longterm Covid risks differ between racial and ethnic groups.
Scientists say health systems, which are still struggling to recover from recent Covid waves while taking in large numbers of patients with the flu and other respiratory illnesses, need significantly more resources to treat patients suffering from the effects of a previous infection suffer with the coronavirus.
“Our systems are not ready yet,” AlAly said.