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Long-term coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a term used to describe the persistence of certain symptoms for more than four weeks after patients have recovered from infection with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS- CoV-2).
Study: Impact of COVID-19 on Health-Related Quality of Life in Japanese COVID-19 Patients. Image Credit: fizkes / Shutterstock.com
What is a long COVID?
To date, more than 4.8 million people worldwide have died from COVID-19. In addition, more than 233 million people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, of which around 80% of them, according to some studies, have developed one or more symptoms reflecting a long COVID.
Long symptoms of COVID can include pain, general fatigue, “brain fog”, sleep disturbances, headaches, shortness of breath, fever, chronic cough, depression, cognitive impairment and health mental and anxiety. According to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK, long COVID encompasses symptomatic COVID-19 that is ongoing four to 12 weeks after infection, as well as post-COVID-19 syndrome extending beyond 12 weeks after infection. infection.
As there remains a lack of available and effective treatments for long-term COVID, these symptoms can affect work and interfere with daily tasks, resulting in poor quality of life. Long COVID is also complicated by the fact that this condition can vary widely between individuals in terms of duration and symptomatology. In addition to a lack of drugs available to treat long COVIDs, a quantitative assessment of the disease burden of long COVIDs is also not available.
To gain empirical insight into health-related quality of life due to long COVID, researchers recently conducted a survey-based study and assessed the impact of long COVID on health-related quality of life in patients. Japanese COVID-19.
About the study
In the current study, which is published on the preprint server medRxiv *, researchers conducted a cross-sectional self-report questionnaire survey of 530 eligible patients who had recovered from acute COVID-19 in April 2021.
These patients were recruited from the outpatient department of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (DCC) of the National Center for World Health and Medicine (NCGM) in Tokyo, Japan, where they had obtained pre-screening tests. donation for COVID-19 convalescent plasmapheresis. . Of the eligible patients, 457 participants were included in this analysis.
The study showed a lower value on a visual analog scale (VAS) and the EQ-5D-3L for participants who reported any of the symptoms of COVID long than those who reported no symptoms. The VAS is a psychometric response scale used as a measure of subjective characteristics or attitudes that cannot be measured directly.
The EQ-5D-3L has five dimensions including mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain / discomfort, depression / anxiety. Each question had three possible answers: no problem, few problems, and extreme problems.
Study results
When comparing the health-related quality of life scores estimated by the EQ-5D-3L questionnaire between those participants without symptoms (n = 349) and those with long COVID (n = 108), the study found a significant disease burden. caused by COVID-19.
Notably, the number of women appeared to be more afflicted, as observed in the “all symptoms” group, compared to the group without symptoms. Other than that, there was no overall difference between the groups in terms of age and medical history. However, the values were lower in the “no symptoms” group than in the group without symptoms.
Additionally, the researchers tabulated the characteristics of “long COVID” symptoms in the paper. In this study, 44% of participants reported at least one symptom four weeks after the onset of their COVID-19 symptoms. The most common symptom of long COVID has been reported to be ‘general fatigue,‘which was followed by’alopecia‘ (hair loss).
Due to the varying duration of the long COVID, the researchers explained that the quality of life lost attributed to the long COVID is much higher than that of influenza-like illnesses (ILI). In a previous study in Japan, the quality of life of long-term COVID patients was superior to that of the acute phase of ILI.
Based on the results of this study, the researchers recommend effective preventive countermeasures for COVID-19, as the role of COVID-19 vaccines in long COVID-19 has yet to be demonstrated.
Some of the limitations of the present study include possible recall bias, a small study cohort, and selection bias. Thus, researchers are calling for studies focusing on the frequency and severity of long COVID symptoms after infection with the new variants of SARS-CoV-2, as well as those evaluating the influence of vaccination on long COVID.
*Important Notice
medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports which are not peer reviewed and, therefore, should not be considered conclusive, guide clinical practice / health-related behavior, or treated as established information.
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