According to a new study, more than three-quarters of people hospitalized with COVID-19 still suffer from at least one symptom after six months.
The research, which was published Saturday in the medical journal Lancet, involved hundreds of patients in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the new coronavirus was first detected.
Fatigue or muscle weakness was found to be the most common symptoms, while people also reported difficulty sleeping.
The scientists said the study, among the few that have tracked long-term symptoms of COVID-19, shows the need for further research into the persistent effects of coronavirus.
“Because COVID-19 is such a new disease, we are only beginning to understand some of its long-term effects on patients’ health, ”said Bin Cao, lead author of the National Center for Respiratory Medicine.
The professor said the research highlighted the need to continuously care for patients after receiving hospital discharge, especially those who have had serious infections.
The new study included 1,733 COVID-19 patients discharged from Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital between January and May last year.
Patients, who had a mean age of 57 years, received visits between June and September and answered questions about their symptoms and health-related quality of life.
The researchers also performed physical exams and lab tests.
The study found that 76% of patients who participated in follow-up (1,265 of 1,655) said they still had symptoms.
Muscle fatigue or weakness was reported in 63 percent, while 26 percent had sleep problems.
The study also examined 94 patients whose blood antibody levels were recorded at the height of the infection as part of another trial.
When these patients were retested after six months, the levels of neutralizing antibodies were 52.5% lower.
The authors said this raises concerns about the possibility of COVID-19 reinfection, although they said larger samples would be needed to clarify how immunity to the virus changes over time.
The World Health Organization has said the virus poses a risk to some people of serious ongoing effects, even among healthy, otherwise healthy, young people who are not hospitalized. To date, there have been more than 89 million confirmed cases of coronavirus, including about 1.9 million related deaths and 49.5 million recovered.
“Patients should be seen for a period of six months or more due to complications from contracting the virus. This means we will have even less capacity, less healthcare available to treat these people,” Oksana told Al Jazeera Pyzik, global health consultant and UCL teacher.
“This will have serious consequences for treating all kinds of chronic diseases,” such as cancer, Pyzik said.
In a commentary article, which was also published in the Lancet, Monica Cortinovis, Norberto Perico and Giuseppe Remuzzi of the Italian Instituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri IRCCS said there was uncertainty about the long-term consequences of the pandemic. in health.
“Unfortunately, there are few reports on the clinical picture of the consequences of COVID-19,” they said, adding that therefore the latest study was “relevant and timely”.
They said long-term multidisciplinary research conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom would help improve understanding and develop therapies to “mitigate the long-term consequences of COVID-19 in multiple organs and tissues.”