January 6, 2022 – Just since you start with a gentle case of COVID-19 doesn’t mean you won’t develop long COVID, researchers say.
“We found that an astonishing 90% of people living with Long COVID initially had only mild COVID-19,” said researchers Sarah Wulf Hanson, PhD, MPH, and Theo Vos, MD, PhD, each of the University of Washington, in an article about their research in The conversation.
“However, after developing Long COVID, the typical person experienced symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive problems such as brain fog – or a combination of these – that interfered with daily functioning. These symptoms had health implications as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury.”
Their study was published in October in Journal of the American Medical Association.
The research team examined data from 54 studies involving 1.2 million people in 22 countries who reported having COVID symptoms. They defined Long COVID as a continuation of symptoms 3 months after the initial infection, with those symptoms lasting not less than 2 months.
Women were twice as likely as men to develop long COVID, and 4 times as likely as children, in response to the study. In addition, one in seven infected people still had symptoms a 12 months later. People who were hospitalized for COVID had the next risk of developing long COVID, but most COVID patients weren’t hospitalized.
Most of the study participants were infected before omicron became the dominant strain. It isn’t clear whether omicron infections result in as many cases of long COVID, but initial research suggests a lower risk, the researchers wrote.
Long COVID has a big impact on people's lives and talent to work, Hanson and Vos wrote, noting that finding effective and inexpensive treatments for Long COVID needs to be a priority for researchers.