Most long-running COVID cases started with mild symptoms: study

January 6, 2022 — Just because you start with a mild case of COVID-19 doesn’t mean you won’t develop long COVID, researchers say.

“We found that a staggering 90% of people living with long COVID initially experienced only mild disease with COVID-19,” said researchers Sarah Wulf Hanson, PhD, MPH, and Theo Vos, MD. , PhD, both from the University of Washington. in an article on their research in The conversation.

“After developing long COVID, however, the typical person experienced symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive issues such as brain fog – or a combination thereof – that affected daily functioning. These symptoms had a health impact as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury.

Their study was published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The research team looked at data from 54 studies of 1.2 million people in 22 countries who reported having symptoms of COVID. They defined long COVID as a continuation of symptoms 3 months after initial infection, with those symptoms lasting at least 2 months.

Women were twice as likely as men to develop long COVID and four times as likely as children, the study found, and 1 in 7 infected people still had symptoms a year later. People hospitalized with COVID were more likely to develop long COVID, but most COVID patients were not hospitalized.

Most people in the study were infected before Omicron became the dominant strain. It’s unclear whether Omicron infections will cause COVID to last that long, but initial research shows a lower risk, the researchers wrote.

Long COVID is having an immense impact on people’s lives and their ability to work, Hanson and Vos wrote, noting that researchers should make finding effective and affordable treatments for long COVID a priority.