Persistent covid is more common in the most seriously ill

2023-10-27 12:32:01

Long Covid appears to be more common with people who had a severe Covid-19 infection. I have seen a collaborative study in which researchers from the Instituto Karolinska (Denmark) which is published in ‘The Lancet Regional Health-Europa‘.

The researchers examined the prevalence of persistent physical symptoms in people with different degrees of Covid-19 severity and compared them to people who had not had a confirmed Covid-19 diagnosis.

The study included 64,880 adults from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland with self-reported physical symptoms between April 2020 and August 2022.

More than 22,000 of the participants were diagnosed with Covid-19 during the period, almost 10% of whom were bedridden for at least seven days. The prevalence of chronic symptoms, such as difficulty breathing, chest pain, dizziness, headaches, and lack of energy/fatiguewas 37% higher in those who had had a covid-19 diagnosis than in those who had not.

Patients who had been bedridden for at least seven days during SARS-CoV-2 infection had the highest prevalence of severe physical symptom burden, more than double that of those not diagnosed with Covid-19. They also had the most persistent symptoms up to two years after diagnosis.

Public health

“Covid has long become a major public health problem as a large proportion of the world’s population has been infected,” says Emily Joyce, one of the first authors of the study. «Our results show the long-term health consequences of the pandemic and highlight the importance of monitoring physical symptoms for up to two years after diagnosisespecially in people who experienced severe covid-19.

Most participants were fully or partially vaccinated, and results were largely the same in analyzes of exclusively vaccinated individuals.

Participants who had never been bedridden during their infection had a prevalence similar to that of people who had not been diagnosed with Covid-19.

For this study, the researchers combined four cohorts of COVIDMENT a large-scale collaborative project between Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Estonia and Scotland.