March 27, 2023 – Good news and bad news on the Long COVID front: Certain groups of individuals – reminiscent of women, smokers and other people who’ve had a severe COVID-19 infection – are at higher risk for Long COVID, a study of greater than 800,000 patients found.
That's the bad news. However, researchers also found that patients who received at the very least two doses of the COVID vaccine had a significantly lower risk of developing long COVID later in life.
“It is not only important to identify which people may be at high risk for developing PCC, [post−COVID-19 condition] and to provide follow-up care, it is imperative to plan public health interventions at the population level,” wrote lead writer Vassilios Vassiliou, PhD, professor of cardiology on the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and his team.
The research published within the journal JAMA Internal Medicinecombined 41 previously published articles containing information from 860,783 patients. The review uncovered a variety of demographic characteristics that were significantly related to Long COVID, including female gender, being over 40 years old, smoking, a high body mass index (BMI), and hospitalization as a result of COVID-19 infection.
Long COVIDAccording to the definition of the World Health Organization, COVID-19 is the persistence of COVID symptoms or the looks of recent symptoms at the very least 3 months after the initial infection.
The presence of other diseases – reminiscent of anxiety, depression, asthma, diabetes and a weakened immune system – can be related to a better risk of long-COVID disease, the researchers report.
The finding that cisgender women are at higher risk for long COVID is consistent with previous analyses and suggests that hormones may play a task in “maintaining the hyperinflammatory status of the acute phase of COVID-19 even after recovery.”
The same applies to previous studies on vaccination status and long-COVID risk – as with many previous studies on this topic, vaccinations were found to have a protective effect against long-COVID.
But Long COVID – all its manifestations, its spread and what we are able to do about it – still stays a Secreteven 3 years after the beginning of the pandemic.
“Although these and other vaccine data suggest that there are factors that may reduce the risk of long COVID disease, nothing yet can completely eliminate the risk of long COVID disease. The only guarantee against long COVID is not getting COVID,” said Linda Geng, MD, PhD, professor of family medicine at Stanford University.
“In addition, we still have not established an effective therapy for the millions of people already suffering from Long COVID, and we urgently need randomized controlled trials to find answers to these questions,” she said.