Just one in four patients hospitalised with covid say they're fully recovered a year later, according to a new study.
The research shows certain groups of people have an increased likelihood of suffering from long Covid. The most common ongoing symptoms of this are fatigue, muscle pain, physically slowing down, poor sleep and breathlessness.
In a study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, more than 2,000 patients after hospitalisation were studied to determine the impact of long Covid. Patients from 39 NHS hospitals agreed to five month and one year follow-up assessments in addition to their clinical care, Wales Online reports.
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Women were 32 per cent less likely, those who were obese were half as likely, and those who had mechanical ventilation in hospital 58 per cent less likely to be fully recovered after one year. Dr Rachael Evans, from the University of Leicester, said: "The limited recovery from five months to a year after hospitalisation in our study across symptoms, mental health, exercise capacity, organ impairment, and quality-of-life is striking.”
She added: “We found female sex and obesity were major risk factors for not recovering at one year. In our clusters, female sex and obesity were also associated with more severe ongoing health impairments including reduced exercise performance and health-related quality of life at one year, potentially highlighting a group that might need higher intensity interventions such as supervised rehabilitation.”
Professor Louise Wain, the British Lung Foundation Chair in Respiratory Research, said: "No specific therapeutics exist for long COVID and our data highlight that effective interventions are urgently required. Our findings of persistent systemic inflammation, particularly in those in the very severe and moderate with cognitive impairment clusters, suggest that these groups might respond to anti-inflammatory strategies.
"The concordance of the severity of physical and mental health impairment in long COVID highlights the need not only for close integration between physical and mental health care for patients with long COVID, including assessment and interventions, but also for knowledge transfer between health-care professionals to improve patient care.
"The finding also suggests the need for complex interventions that target both physical and mental health impairments to alleviate symptoms. However, specific therapeutic approaches to manage post-traumatic stress disorder might also be needed.”
Professor Christopher Brightling, National Institute for Health Research Senior Investigator, said: "Our study highlights an urgent need for health-care services to support this large and rapidly increasing patient population in whom a substantial burden of symptoms exist, including reduced exercise capacity and substantially decreased health-related quality of life one year after hospital discharge.
"Without effective treatments, long COVID could become a highly prevalent new long-term condition. Our study also provides a rationale for investigating treatments for long COVID with a precision-medicine approach to target treatments to the individual patient’s profile to restore their health-related quality of life.”
The findings are due to be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases in Lisbon, Portugal.
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