Hair loss and a low sex drive have been added to fatigue and brain fog as symptoms of Long Covid following a major British study involving more than two million people. Researchers discovered that Long Covid sufferers have experienced a much wider set of more than 60 symptoms than previously thought - including sexual dysfunction and alopecia.
Their findings, published in the journal Nature Medicine, showed that patients with a primary care record of infection with the virus that causes Covid-19 reported 62 symptoms much more frequently 12 weeks after initial infection than those who hadn’t contracted the virus. Anonymised electronic health records of 2.4 million people in the UK were analysed by researchers from the University of Birmingham alongside a team of doctors and researchers across England.
The data taken between January 2020 and April 2021 involved more than 480,000 people with prior infection, and 1.9 million people with no indication of coronavirus infection after matching for other clinical diagnoses. Using only non-hospitalised patients, the team of researchers were able to identify three categories of distinct symptoms reported by people with persistent health problems after infection.
