People experiencing the long-term effects of COVID-19 (known as “long-term COVID” or post-COVID condition) may develop only seven health symptoms for up to a year after infection.
They are heartbeat, hair loss, fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, joint pain, and obesity.
To develop the findings, researchers reviewed Oracle Cerner’s real-world data from electronic medical records containing anonymized information for medical research purposes.
After examining data from a total of 52,461 patients at 122 medical facilities across the United States, researchers selected the top 47 most commonly reported health symptoms from COVID-19 for their study.
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. It was a great experience,” said Chi-Ren Shyu, lead author of the University of Missouri Data Science and Informatics Institute and Research, open forum infections.
“Before we looked at the data, we thought we would find a sufficient amount of symptoms that are particularly relevant to the long-term duration of COVID, but we have not.”
Syu, who is also a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said the results could help fellow researchers in their ongoing efforts to study the different effects of COVID-19.
“By making new connections that may not have been known before, researchers will be able to better understand how SARS-CoV-2 mutates or evolves,” said Shyu. says. “In the future, electronic medical records could be used to rapidly detect subgroups of patients who may have these long-term health conditions.”
The findings will provide much-needed information for health care providers about what to ask and what to look for when visiting patients with long-lasting COVID symptoms, says co-authors and medical school professors. Adnan Qureshi, Professor of Neurology and Doctor of Neurology, said: MU Healthcare.
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. The concept of long-term COVID 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 residual symptoms that prevent them from returning to work or normal activities or cause disabilities,” says Quresi.
“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 postviral syndromes.”
Other co-authors are from the University of Minnesota and the University of Missouri.
The National Institutes of Health supported this work. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.
sauce: University of Missouri
