One in eight individuals who get coronavirus develop not less than one symptom of long Covid, some of the comprehensive studies on the condition thus far suggested on Thursday.

With greater than half a billion coronavirus cases recorded worldwide because the start of the pandemic, there was rising concern concerning the lasting symptoms seen in individuals with long Covid.

Nonetheless almost none of the present research has compared long Covid victims with individuals who have never been infected, making it possible that among the health problems weren’t brought on by the virus.

A latest study published in The Lancet journal asked greater than 76,400 adults within the Netherlands to fill out a web-based questionnaire on 23 common long Covid symptoms.

Between March 2020 and August 2021, each participant filled out the questionnaire 24 times.

During that period, greater than 4,200 of them — 5.5 percent — reported catching Covid.

Of those with Covid, over 21 percent had not less than one latest or severely increased symptom three to 5 months after becoming infected.

Nonetheless nearly nine percent of a control group which didn’t have Covid reported an analogous increase.

This suggested that 12.7 percent of those that had Covid — around one in eight — suffered from long-term symptoms, the study said.

The research also recorded symptoms before and after Covid infection, allowing the researchers to further pinpoint exactly what was related to the virus.

It found that common long Covid symptoms include chest pain, respiration difficulties, muscle pain, lack of taste and smell, and general fatigue.

One in every of the study’s authors, Aranka Ballering of the Dutch University of Groningen, said long Covid was “an urgent problem with a mounting human toll”.

“By symptoms in an uninfected control group and in individuals each before and after SARS-CoV-2 infection, we were in a position to account for symptoms which could have been a results of non-infectious disease health facets of the pandemic, resembling stress brought on by restrictions and uncertainty,” she said.

The authors of the study said its limitations included that it didn’t cover later variants, resembling Delta or Omicron, and didn’t collect details about some symptoms resembling brain fog, which have since been considered a standard sign of long Covid.

One other study writer, Judith Rosmalen, said “future research should include mental health symptoms” resembling depression and anxiety, in addition to facets like brain fog, insomnia and a sense of malaise after even minor exertion.

Christopher Brightling and Rachael Evans, experts from Britain’s Leicester University who weren’t involved within the study, said it was “a serious advance” on previous long Covid research since it had an uninfected control group.

“Encouragingly, emerging data from other studies” suggests there’s a lower rate of long Covid in individuals who have been vaccinated or infected with the Omicron variant, they said in a linked Lancet comment.