Long Covid Symptoms Persist Two Years After Hospitalization
/By Pat Anson, PNN Editor
About half the patients who were first hospitalized in China with the COVID-19 virus still had symptoms of pain, fatigue or insomnia two years after being discharged, according to a new study that suggests that long covid may persist long after the initial infection.
Long covid is a poorly understood disorder characterized by body pain, fatigue, cognitive impairment and difficulty sleeping.
Wuhan, China was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, which makes it a good place to study how infections with the original strain of the virus affect patients long-term.
Researchers at the China–Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing followed nearly 1,200 patients who were hospitalized in Wuhan with acute COVID-19 between January 7 and May 29, 2020, and reassessed them six months, 12 months and two years after discharge.
While their physical and mental health generally improved over time, regardless of disease severity, researchers found that 55% of the Wuhan patients still had at least one Covid symptom after two years, compared to 68% after six months. Many reported a poorer quality of life, less ability to exercise, more mental health problems, and increased use of healthcare services compared to people who were not infected.
“Our findings indicate that for a certain proportion of hospitalised COVID-19 survivors, while they may have cleared the initial infection, more than two years is needed to recover fully from COVID-19,” said lead author Bin Cao, MD, Vice President and Director, Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, China-Japan Friendship Hospital
“Ongoing follow-up of COVID-19 survivors, particularly those with symptoms of long COVID, is essential to understand the longer course of the illness, as is further exploration of the benefits of rehabilitation programmes for recovery. There is a clear need to provide continued support to a significant proportion of people who’ve had COVID-19, and to understand how vaccines, emerging treatments, and variants affect long-term health outcomes.”
Nearly 90% of the Wuhan patients were well enough to return to work after two years, despite lingering health problems. Nearly a third (31%) reported fatigue or muscle weakness and sleep difficulties. They were also more likely to report joint pain, palpitations, dizziness, headaches, difficulty breathing, anxiety and depression.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the longest longitudinal follow-up study of individuals who have recovered from acute COVID-19,” researchers reported in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
“Throughout the 2 years after acute infection, hospital survivors with COVID-19 continued to recover in terms of symptomatic sequelae, exercise capacity, mental health, and quality of life, regardless of initial disease severity, but a fairly high burden of symptoms was still seen at 2 years. The COVID-19 survivors had not returned to the same health status as the general population 2 years after acute infection, so ongoing follow-up is needed to characterise the protracted natural history of long COVID.”
More than two years after COVID-19 first appeared in Wuhan, China is having another COVID crisis – this one caused by the Omricon variant of the virus. About 400 million people are currently living under some form of lockdown, with residents of China’s largest city, Shanghai, confined to their homes for weeks.
