Study unexpectedly found only 7 health symptoms

COLUMBIA, Missouri — In a new study, a team of researchers at the University of Missouri made an unexpected discovery: people experiencing the long-term effects of COVID-19 (known as “long-term COVID” or the post-COVID condition) may only occur. 7 health symptoms for up to 1 year after infection. They are heartbeat, hair loss, fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, joint pain, and obesity.

To develop the findings, the team reviewed Orcale Cerner’s real-world data from electronic medical records, which contain anonymized information for medical research purposes. After examining data from a total of 52,461 patients at 122 medical facilities across the United States, the researchers identified the most commonly reported health symptoms from his COVID over time to investigate for this study. We selected the top 47 of The researchers then looked for comparisons of reported health symptoms. Many are also common to other viral respiratory infections. Among three different subgroups of people:

• People diagnosed with COVID-19 but without common viral respiratory infections such as influenza or pneumonia
• People with common viral respiratory infections but not COVID-19
• People who do not have COVID-19 or other common viral respiratory infections.

“Despite the overwhelming number of prolonged COVID symptoms previously reported by other studies, we found only a few symptoms specifically associated with infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics and the study’s corresponding author: “Before we looked into the data, we thought we would find a sufficient amount of symptoms that are particularly relevant to the long-term duration of COVID, but that is not the case.” was.”

Shyu, who is also a Paul K. and Dianne Shumaker professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the MU College of Engineering, said the results are an ongoing effort by fellow researchers to study the different effects of COVID-19. said that it could be useful for

“By creating new connections that may have been unknown before, researchers will be able to better understand how SARS-CoV-2 mutates or evolves,” said Shyu. says Mr. “In the future, electronic medical records could be used to rapidly detect subgroups of patients who may have these long-term health conditions.”

Adnan Qureshi, professor of neurology at MU School of Medicine, Ph.D. in neurology at MU Health Care, and co-author of the study, said the findings are useful for health care providers when it comes to what to ask and when to look for them. provide much-needed information to Visits with patients with long COVID symptoms.

Qureshi said the findings could also help researchers looking at other aspects of COVID-19, such as the virus’ effects on the brain and immune system. He said the long COVID concept was developed after clinicians began to realize that a group of people called “survivors” of COVID-19 were “no longer always normal.”

“Survivors still have symptoms that prevent or prevent them from returning to work and daily life,” said Qureshi. “This is not because COVID-19 transmission is still active, but because infection causes long-term consequences or sequelae, and the post-COVID-19 syndrome can persist for months or years. Our study identified long-term sequelae unique to COVID-19 and was able to separate the post-COVID syndrome from other post-viral syndromes.”

“COVID-specific long-term sequelae compared to common viral respiratory infections: an analysis of 17,487 infected adult patients” published in the journal open forum infectionsOther co-authors were Jane Armer and William Baskett from MU and Daniel Syu from the University of Minnesota. This research was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (5T32LM012410). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

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