Nearly half of people who contract mild or moderate cases of COVID-19 still experience symptoms six months later, according to a new study published by Israeli researchers.
The research, which is expected to be published this month in the Journal of Clinical microbiology and infection, evaluated 103 people over the age of 18 who had coronavirus between April and October 2020. People had mild to moderate symptoms, meaning that even though they were not asymptomatic, they were not hospitalized for a more severe case of the disease.
Participants were interviewed up to four times during the study.
“It’s very scary that after six months young people who were healthy and feeling great before the coronavirus are still showing symptoms,” said Dr Sarah Israel of Hadassah-University Medical Center, who helped write The report.
At six months, 46% of patients had at least one unresolved symptom, most often fatigue (22%), changes in smell and taste (15%), or difficulty breathing (8%).
The study showed that 44% of people suffered from headaches, 41% from fever, 39% from muscle pain and 38% from dry cough as the first symptom of COVID-19, usually around the second day of onset. disease. But many of these symptoms resolved rather quickly.
In contrast, the changes in smell and taste, which usually appeared around the fourth day after the onset of illness, were among the most lasting.
A total of 14 symptoms were included in the final analysis, of which 12 were listed as symptoms of COVID-19 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in December 2020. These include change in taste, change in smell, fever, dryness cough, productive cough, body aches, headache, runny nose, sore throat, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, vomiting and nausea.
cnxps.cmd.push (function () {cnxps ({playerId: ’36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b’}). render (‘4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6’);});
if (window.location.pathname.indexOf (“656089”)! = -1) {console.log (“hedva connatix”); document.getElementsByClassName (“divConnatix”)[0].style.display = “none”;}
Additionally, more than half of participants (53%) complained of a non-CDC symptom: loss of appetite.
Finally, fatigue, which is now listed as a symptom of CDC, did not appear explicitly in the original questionnaire, but was self-reported by 18% of patients under “any other symptom”.
Other symptoms mentioned by some patients included memory loss, hair loss and depression, “many symptoms for which it is difficult to understand why patients suffered from these symptoms after COVID,” Israel said.
“Long-term COVID is emerging as a phenomenon in which patients have long-term unresolved symptoms,” the report says. “It could be prolonged symptoms of COVID-19, or a post-COVID syndrome for which autonomic nervous system dysfunction has been proposed, although more research is needed to establish the causes.
Most of the patients were generally in good health before contracting the virus. Two of them had high blood pressure, six had respiratory disease, two had heart disease, and 16 were clinically obese.
The study had several limitations, the report said, including the fact that the data collection method used, calling patients at different intervals, could have resulted in recall bias. In addition, patients were recruited via social networks and word of mouth; therefore, they were a much younger cohort with higher incomes and higher education levels.
Israel said it hoped the information in the report would give doctors a better understanding of the long-term health complications of COVID-19 and that it would serve to encourage young people to get vaccinated.
“I think people now know it’s not an easy virus,” she said. “Even if you hardly get sick, the virus can affect you for months afterwards. The risk of side effects from the vaccine is low compared to the symptoms of the virus. “
More work should be done to assess whether asymptomatic patients have similar symptoms after recovery, Israel said. The team hopes to continue investigating those involved in the current study to determine when their existing symptoms go away, she added.
