It wasn’t that long ago that some people speculated that long COVID was all in the mind – a psychosomatic illness. Thankfully, that period of speculation is now behind us. We have compelling evidence that long COVID is very real and can affect major organs in people who were previously hospitalised with the disease.
I’m the lead investigator on an ongoing study called C-More which looks at the long-term harms caused by COVID. Our latest findings, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, show that nearly a third of people who were severely ill with COVID have multiple organ abnormalities on MRI five months after they were discharged from hospital. This is based on a sample of 259 people who were hospitalised with COVID and 52 in the control group who did not catch COVID.
MRI scans revealed that people with long COVID were 14 times more likely to have lung abnormalities than people who never had the disease, three times more likely to have brain abnormalities and two times more likely to have kidney abnormalities. The extent of MRI abnormalities was linked to the severity of their COVID, their age and whether or not they had other diseases.
