OVID-19 continues to haunt some patients, with many affected by so-called long COVID. Women and people with high body mass index (BMI) could also be at higher risk for the condition, a recent study has found.
For his or her study, published Wednesday on PLOS Global Public Health, a team of researchers conducted a survey to “characterize the burden and predictors” for long COVID.
Long COVID, also often known as post-COVID syndrome, is the condition wherein the symptoms patients develop during or after a COVID-19 infection persist for over 12 weeks after being diagnosed with it. Symptoms may range from coughing, fatigue and breathlessness to brain fog, tinnitus and chest pain.
“Ongoing symptomatic COVID-19 or post-COVID-19 syndrome is estimated to be adversely affecting the day-to-day activities of 836,000 people in the UK in line with the ONS (Office for National Statistics, UK) report, with 244,000 saying their ability to undertake day-to-day activities had been ‘limited so much,'” the researchers wrote.
To shed further light on the condition and potentially inform healthcare services, the researchers surveyed people in Norfolk, East England U.K. who were diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2020. In total, some 1,487 people participated within the survey, wherein they answered queries about pre- and post-COVID conditions comparable to breathlessness, lack of taste or smell, and their use of healthcare services related to long COVID.
“We wanted to search out out what aspects might make people roughly liable to developing long COVID,” considered one of the study authors, Vassilios Vassiliou of the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Norwich Medical School, said within the university’s news release.
Of all of the participants, 774, or 52.1% experienced long COVID. What’s interesting, nonetheless, is that more women had the symptoms in comparison with men, with the male sex appearing to be “protective of post-COVID symptoms” in comparison with the feminine sex.
Having the next BMI was also related to higher risks of developing long COVID.
“It was found that female sex and high BMI are related to higher likelihood of developing post-COVID19 syndrome,” the researchers wrote. “Those two aspects have a major predictive value in the usage of further health services amongst those diagnosed with post-COVID19 syndrome.”
The outcomes, they are saying, are in step with one other previous research in England, wherein females were also found to have higher long COVID rates than males.
This sheds further light on the condition that many proceed to suffer from. In line with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as an illustration, long COVID has also been more often observed in some people comparable to those that had severe COVID-19, while those that weren’t vaccinated for COVID-19 may additionally face higher risks for it.
The impact of long COVID may transcend just the patients, too, as an authority identified that it may additionally have a $3.7 trillion impact on the U.S. economy. Hence, the outcomes of this study provide worthwhile details about long COVID and the people who find themselves probably to suffer from it.
“We hope that our work will help policymakers plan local services and in addition inform the broader public of the size of the long COVID pandemic,” Vassiliou said, as per UEA.
“Our academic colleagues on the University of East Anglia have really helped local health and care organizations to discover local patients vulnerable to long COVID, helping us to do all we will to support them on their recovery journey,” one other study writer, Mark Lim, added.