Key Takeaways:
- According to a recent Dutch study, up to one in eight people exposed to COVID-19 would face long-lasting impacts.
- The World Health Organization and the Canadian government estimate that 10% and 20% of patients experienced prolonged COVID.
- The authors claim that Delta and Omicron were not included in the study but only included patients with older COVID-19 infections.
According to a recent Dutch study, up to one in eight persons exposed to COVID-19 will experience long-lasting effects.
The analysis, issued in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet, investigated groups of adults with COVID-19 diagnoses and uninfected individuals to see if they experienced worsening or new disease symptoms.
According to the authors’ research, 12.7% of patients in the general population, or one in eight, had long-lasting COVID-19 symptoms.
According to Judith Rosmalen, professor of psychosomatic medicine at the University of Groningen and the study’s main author, including uninfected participants in the study yields a more accurate prediction of how long COVID will likely persist in the general population.
According to the World Health Organization and the Canadian government, 10% and 20% of people experience lengthy COVID.
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For the Dutch study, the primary symptoms of protracted COVID were chest pain, uncomfortable or difficult breathing, loss of taste, muscle pain and smell, tingling in the extremities, a lump in the throat, feelings of heat and cold, heavy arms or legs, and general fatigue.
According to Rosmalen in the release, “there is an urgent need for data defining the extent and nature of the long-term symptoms encountered by some patients after COVID-19 sickness.”
However, most prior research on extended COVID has not examined the prevalence of these symptoms in people who have not been given a COVID-19 diagnostic or examined the symptoms of specific patients before receiving a COVID-19 diagnosis.
The Lifelines COVID-19 cohort study participants were first asked to periodically complete digital questionnaires on 23 symptoms frequently connected to extended COVID.
More than 167,000 people from the Dutch northern population are a part of the multigenerational Lifelines project.
The same individuals received questionnaires 24 times between March 2020 and August 2021. According to the researchers, the majority of the data was gathered before COVID-19 vaccines were distributed in the Netherlands.
If a participant had a positive test result or a medical diagnosis, they were deemed to have COVID.
The participants’ average age was 53.7, and 60.8% were female.
4,231 of the 76,422 participants had the COVID-19 virus. After considering sex, age, and the fact that the positive group’s COVID-19 diagnosis had been validated in a questionnaire, this group was matched with 8,462 uninfected individuals.
According to the study, 381 out of 1,782 COVID-positive participants (21.4%) had ongoing symptoms, unlike 361 out of 4,130 people who were not infected (8.7 percent).
Together, these findings suggest that COVID-19 is the cause of these symptoms in 12.7% of patients, according to the study’s authors.
“Post-COVID-19 syndrome, often referred to as protracted COVID, is an urgent issue with an increasing human toll,” said Aranka Ballering, a PhD candidate and the study’s first author.
“Understanding the primary symptoms and the incidence of post-COVID-19 in the general community marks a huge step forward for our ability to design research that can ultimately inform successful health-care solutions to the long-term COVID-19 symptoms,” said the study’s author.
According to the authors, the study only included patients infected with older COVID-19 versions, not Delta and Omicron.
According to the researchers, the true prevalence of COVID-19 may also be understated since asymptomatic infections go undiagnosed.
The researchers noted that the study did not examine additional long-term COVID symptoms, such as brain fog, that have since been recognized as possibly relevant.
Source: CTV News
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