6 ms·

Long-haul symptoms affect majority of Covid-19 patients, UA study finds

49 points by dd36 5y ago

brlewis 5y ago
Seems paywalled. Alternate: https://news.arizona.edu/story/many-mild-covid-19-infections-experience-long-term-symptoms https://news.arizona.edu/story/many-mild-covid-19-infections...
- criticaltinker 5y ago
  Thanks, this is a much better article with no paywall - this link should be used. Here's the cited paper [1]. The sample size is small with significant bias in the demographics and plenty of confounding factors that were not controlled. The results should be taken with a large grain of salt. IMO the title of OP should read: "Long-haul symptoms may affect majority of Covid-19 patients, UA study finds". Highlights: > 303 people who had a positive PCR or antigen test and were not hospitalized for their illness were surveyed. > Participants had a mean age of 44 years (range 12-82 years), were mostly female (70%), non-Hispanic white (68%), with college or greater education (38%), and with at least one pre-existing chronic condition (67%). The most commonly reported pre-existing conditions were seasonal allergies (42%), asthma (16%) and hypertension (15%). > At ≥ 30 days follow-up, 208 of 303 (68.7%) participants reported experiencing persistent symptoms. > The 10 most commonly reported symptoms among individuals with PASC at >30 days post-positive test fatigue (37.5%); shortness of breath (37.5%); brain fog (30.8%); stress (30.8%); altered smell or taste (26.4%); body aches or muscle pains (26.0%); insomnia (22.1%); headaches (20.7%); joint pain (20.2%); and congestion or runny nose (19.2%) [1] Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 in a non-hospitalized cohort: results from the Arizona CoVHORT https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254347 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
oliv__ 5y ago
> Researchers also found that individuals who experienced long COVID were more likely to be less educated, have seasonal allergies and pre-existing health conditions, and self-report greater symptom severity than people without long COVID. How do we know any of these symptoms were caused by COVID? EDIT: why the downvotes, this is a genuine question.
- alephnan 5y ago
  Or maybe educational rates affect how honest people in these surveys
- brianpan 5y ago
  How do we know? That's literally what research is for. Researchers compare symptoms of people who do vs people who don't have covid. Math tells us if the results are statistically significant. Biology helps explain the mechanisms causing it.
  - oliv__ 5y ago
    I'm sorry but the symptoms reported "fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, stress or anxiety, altered taste or smell, body aches and muscle pain, insomnia, headaches, joint pain, and congestion" could all (except for altered taste/smell perhaps) be linked to a million other causes. What makes you so confident that these are due to COVID? As far as I know, it's not like we've discovered an exact biological mechanism we can point to and say "that's what causes long COVID".
    - foxylad 5y ago
      Let me dumb it down for you. If a lot* of people don't have those symptoms, catch covid, then do have those symptoms, you can be confident that covid is linked to those symptoms - whether we have the exact biological mechanism or not. *A statistically significant number.
      - mrosett 5y ago
        Downvoted both because of your tone and because other mechanisms (like people who’ve had Covid becoming more prone to reporting symptoms caused by other sources) could explain these results.
      - nradov 5y ago
        But that paper makes no such claim. They didn't check symptoms for the same subjects both before and after infection, so we can't be confident of causality.
_rpd 5y ago
Actual paper ... > Among participants who tested positive for COVID-19, 68.7% experienced at least one symptom after 30 days, marking the distinction for long COVID. This prevalence increased to 77% after 60 days of follow-up. Researchers also found that individuals who experienced long COVID were more likely to be less educated, have seasonal allergies and pre-existing health conditions, and self-report greater symptom severity than people without long COVID. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254347 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- criticaltinker 5y ago
  In this study N = 303, and ~67% of these participants had at least one pre-existing chronic condition. Furthermore the symptoms were self-reported through an online survey. Pointing out these facts because the results are far from conclusive, and thus may not be representative of the population at large.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  How can the prevalence increase between 30 and 60 days? Shouldn't this be x days of continuously experiencing the symptoms? Otherwise why do they assume the symptom is from the same continued illness?
- peakaboo 5y ago
  Because their immune systems are weak due to unhealthy food and life habits that poor, uneducated people usually have. We don't need vaccines, we need to start taking care of our bodies. If you look at countries where the majority of people are educated and in good shape like Sweden, covid deaths are near 0 now because natural immunity has taken care of it.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    > Sweden, covid deaths are near 0 No, they are not. 15k is much greater than zero, especially in such a small country. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ I don't think it's worth discussing the rest of your comment, you believe what you want to believe.
mjfl 5y ago
I had covid 8 months ago and have definitely experienced long term changes in taste and smell. Have a hard time experiencing sweetness. I don't enjoy apples or bananas anymore, they taste bitter, or like chemicals. I can't taste the richness of chocolate. Luckily savory has come back and I enjoy that relatively more now.
- Causality1 5y ago
  Yep. I miss being able to enjoy French fries. I hope someday we have a treatment for it.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    There was some news a while back that (mRNA?) vaccines seemed to treat or cure long COVID for some folks, but I don't know if it's accurate or still applicable: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-03-09/can-a-covid-vaccine-help-long-haul-sufferers https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-03-09/...
    - criticaltinker 5y ago
      Immunity acquired through vaccination or natural infection helps prevent severe illness, which is likely to reduce the risk of damage to areas of the brain responsible for smell and taste [1][2]. AFAIK, there is currently no scientific evidence supporting the idea that mRNA vaccines uniquely "treat or cure long COVID" through other mechanisms. [1] Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v... [2] Brain Imaging Use and Findings in COVID-19: A Single Academic Center Experience in the Epicenter of Disease in the United States http://www.ajnr.org/content/ajnr/41/7/1179.full.pdf http://www.ajnr.org/content/ajnr/41/7/1179.full.pdf
    - longcovthrowa 5y ago
      I don't know for certain if I had long covid but I experienced weird symptoms in my body beginning in January when there where >30,000 new cases per day in my country. I was fatigued, had unexplainable chest pains some of the time, had problems concentrating, headaches, always a runny nose. I never did a antibody test because I self-isolated for most of the time and never met people without a mask, so I initially thought I was just developing an allergy. Multiple doctors tried to find out what was wrong but all tests where pointing to me being very healthy. Then I got my second mRNA shot in July and all those symptoms went away, like magic. Very weird for me and maybe I had long covid and what you described happened.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Long Haul symptoms are virtually the same as Beri-Beri or extreme vitamin B1 deficiency. Just saying. Further: PCR tests are non-specific even when you keep the cycle count down - they show positive for BOTH Covid and Flu which is why flu "disappeared" in 2020: PCR tests were positive flu and was judged as Covid.
- throw-away_42 5y ago
  > Further: PCR tests are non-specific even when you keep the cycle count down - they show positive for BOTH Covid and Flu which is why flu "disappeared" in 2020: PCR tests were positive flu and was judged as Covid. False. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210730/Claims-that-CDCe28099S-PCR-test-cane28099t-tell-covid-from-flu-are-wrong.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210730/Claims-that-CDCe2...
- digdugdirk 5y ago
  That's completely inaccurate. PCR tests were specific for only Covid. They were extremely good at covid identification. A recent "recall" of PCR testing protocol was to introduce a new test that could perform identification of both Covid and/or flu. Link here, just the first non-technical one I found: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/pcr-test-recall-can-the-test-tell-the-difference-between-covid-19-and-the-flu https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/pcr-test-recall-can-the-te... Please be careful about what information you consume, and be even more careful about what information you convey to others.
  - senectus1 5y ago
    This misunderstanding i feel comes from the deeply technocratic language that the CDC uses for public relations posts... it makes it super easy for social media to misunderstand and spread in the form of FUD, I've seen a lot of it in the last month or so.
    - thephyber 5y ago
      No. You are blaming the experts in epidemiology for not being able to overcome political agendas, cable news propaganda, ignorant people, and a lack of trust in “the establishment” (which includes the FDA and CDC) caused by all of the above. The PR article was for medical professionals. Americans on social media have become far too gullible. They can’t be bothered to fact check and they sure aren’t going to the source material. This is not a problem the CDC’s comma team could have prevented.
wincy 5y ago
My wife coughed for almost a year. A YEAR. Awful coughing that hurt my ears when I was nearby. Never anything coming up. Just coughing and coughing and coughing. One day it finally stopped. I had a chest x-ray last year because my chest hurt. Nothing showed up. It kept hurting. For a year every day when I’d wake up my right chest hurt. It hurt a little bit to breathe for almost a year. Eventually I realized if I sort of flexed in a weird way tensing up the muscles I could breathe without it hurting. So I started doing that, and one day that pain stopped. I don’t know if these were symptoms of long haul Covid but they were certainly bizarre things to have happen, and it seemed like a major coincidence for it to happen during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  I had similar symptoms. Scary persistent cough for something like six months. Finally got chest xrays. Doctor called and left a message - "we found something on your xrays, give us a call". That was on a Friday, and the office wasn't open till Monday. I spent the weekend mentally preparing my will. When I finally talked to the guy: "General lung irritation, possibly due to postnasal drip, take a sample of this anti-allergy nasal spray". I think I used it once or twice, but mainly it just cleared up all on its own. This was a dozen years ago, long before covid. I guess what I'm saying is: There were a million problems your body could have before covid, most of them not life threatening, and those issues are still around even with this scary disease running rampant.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  reminds me of pertussis, awful cough going on for months. Although quite rare in the US nowadays.
nradov 5y ago
It's hard to take this study seriously when there were no proper controls and many of the symptoms are non specific. They reported anxiety as one of the most common "long COVID" symptoms, but according to the NIMH something like a fifth of US adults have anxiety in any given year. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...
- koolba 5y ago
  > … but according to the NIMH something like a fifth of US adults have anxiety in any given year. That has to be significantly higher after 20 months of “breathe and your dead!” news coverage.
- criticaltinker 5y ago
  FWIW the researchers acknowledged this in the cited paper: > because stress/anxiety is a symptom that many persons may be experiencing due to the pandemic, and not due to COVID-19 per se, we quantified the number of individuals who experienced stress/anxiety as their only symptom > We found that only 6 participants reported stress/anxiety as their sole symptom, demonstrating that our PASC prevalence is not driven by this non-specific symptom. That said, completely agree that the study is fairly low quality and has many confounding factors, see my other responses here for further commentary.
sunkenvicar 5y ago
I encourage any suffering long haulers to check out flccc.net . They maintain a list of doctors in the US willing to prescribe therapeutics.
djmips 5y ago
Post viral illness damage has been known for a long time, for example post polio. I feel like there's probably been a host of other viral illness that could also be responsible for long Covid like symptoms but it's only with Covid that we are seeing it being in the public consciousness. The preexisting conditions may confound the study
rSi 5y ago
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons can't be access from within the EU because of GDPR
haspoken 5y ago
https://archive.is/1yleY https://archive.is/1yleY

49 points by dd36 5y ago

Seems paywalled. Alternate: https://news.arizona.edu/story/many-mild-covid-19-infections-experience-long-term-symptoms https://news.arizona.edu/story/many-mild-covid-19-infections...

criticaltinker 5y ago
Thanks, this is a much better article with no paywall - this link should be used. Here's the cited paper [1]. The sample size is small with significant bias in the demographics and plenty of confounding factors that were not controlled. The results should be taken with a large grain of salt. IMO the title of OP should read: "Long-haul symptoms may affect majority of Covid-19 patients, UA study finds". Highlights: > 303 people who had a positive PCR or antigen test and were not hospitalized for their illness were surveyed. > Participants had a mean age of 44 years (range 12-82 years), were mostly female (70%), non-Hispanic white (68%), with college or greater education (38%), and with at least one pre-existing chronic condition (67%). The most commonly reported pre-existing conditions were seasonal allergies (42%), asthma (16%) and hypertension (15%). > At ≥ 30 days follow-up, 208 of 303 (68.7%) participants reported experiencing persistent symptoms. > The 10 most commonly reported symptoms among individuals with PASC at >30 days post-positive test fatigue (37.5%); shortness of breath (37.5%); brain fog (30.8%); stress (30.8%); altered smell or taste (26.4%); body aches or muscle pains (26.0%); insomnia (22.1%); headaches (20.7%); joint pain (20.2%); and congestion or runny nose (19.2%) [1] Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 in a non-hospitalized cohort: results from the Arizona CoVHORT https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254347 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

oliv__ 5y ago

> Researchers also found that individuals who experienced long COVID were more likely to be less educated, have seasonal allergies and pre-existing health conditions, and self-report greater symptom severity than people without long COVID. How do we know any of these symptoms were caused by COVID? EDIT: why the downvotes, this is a genuine question.

alephnan 5y ago
Or maybe educational rates affect how honest people in these surveys
brianpan 5y ago
How do we know? That's literally what research is for. Researchers compare symptoms of people who do vs people who don't have covid. Math tells us if the results are statistically significant. Biology helps explain the mechanisms causing it.
- oliv__ 5y ago
  I'm sorry but the symptoms reported "fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, stress or anxiety, altered taste or smell, body aches and muscle pain, insomnia, headaches, joint pain, and congestion" could all (except for altered taste/smell perhaps) be linked to a million other causes. What makes you so confident that these are due to COVID? As far as I know, it's not like we've discovered an exact biological mechanism we can point to and say "that's what causes long COVID".
  - foxylad 5y ago
    Let me dumb it down for you. If a lot* of people don't have those symptoms, catch covid, then do have those symptoms, you can be confident that covid is linked to those symptoms - whether we have the exact biological mechanism or not. *A statistically significant number.
    - mrosett 5y ago
      Downvoted both because of your tone and because other mechanisms (like people who’ve had Covid becoming more prone to reporting symptoms caused by other sources) could explain these results.
    - nradov 5y ago
      But that paper makes no such claim. They didn't check symptoms for the same subjects both before and after infection, so we can't be confident of causality.

_rpd 5y ago

Actual paper ... > Among participants who tested positive for COVID-19, 68.7% experienced at least one symptom after 30 days, marking the distinction for long COVID. This prevalence increased to 77% after 60 days of follow-up. Researchers also found that individuals who experienced long COVID were more likely to be less educated, have seasonal allergies and pre-existing health conditions, and self-report greater symptom severity than people without long COVID. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254347 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
criticaltinker 5y ago
In this study N = 303, and ~67% of these participants had at least one pre-existing chronic condition. Furthermore the symptoms were self-reported through an online survey. Pointing out these facts because the results are far from conclusive, and thus may not be representative of the population at large.
jobigoud 5y ago
How can the prevalence increase between 30 and 60 days? Shouldn't this be x days of continuously experiencing the symptoms? Otherwise why do they assume the symptom is from the same continued illness?
peakaboo 5y ago
Because their immune systems are weak due to unhealthy food and life habits that poor, uneducated people usually have. We don't need vaccines, we need to start taking care of our bodies. If you look at countries where the majority of people are educated and in good shape like Sweden, covid deaths are near 0 now because natural immunity has taken care of it.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  > Sweden, covid deaths are near 0 No, they are not. 15k is much greater than zero, especially in such a small country. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ I don't think it's worth discussing the rest of your comment, you believe what you want to believe.

mjfl 5y ago

I had covid 8 months ago and have definitely experienced long term changes in taste and smell. Have a hard time experiencing sweetness. I don't enjoy apples or bananas anymore, they taste bitter, or like chemicals. I can't taste the richness of chocolate. Luckily savory has come back and I enjoy that relatively more now.

Causality1 5y ago
Yep. I miss being able to enjoy French fries. I hope someday we have a treatment for it.
- dataflow 5y ago
  There was some news a while back that (mRNA?) vaccines seemed to treat or cure long COVID for some folks, but I don't know if it's accurate or still applicable: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-03-09/can-a-covid-vaccine-help-long-haul-sufferers https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-03-09/...
  - criticaltinker 5y ago
    Immunity acquired through vaccination or natural infection helps prevent severe illness, which is likely to reduce the risk of damage to areas of the brain responsible for smell and taste [1][2]. AFAIK, there is currently no scientific evidence supporting the idea that mRNA vaccines uniquely "treat or cure long COVID" through other mechanisms. [1] Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v... [2] Brain Imaging Use and Findings in COVID-19: A Single Academic Center Experience in the Epicenter of Disease in the United States http://www.ajnr.org/content/ajnr/41/7/1179.full.pdf http://www.ajnr.org/content/ajnr/41/7/1179.full.pdf
  - longcovthrowa 5y ago
    I don't know for certain if I had long covid but I experienced weird symptoms in my body beginning in January when there where >30,000 new cases per day in my country. I was fatigued, had unexplainable chest pains some of the time, had problems concentrating, headaches, always a runny nose. I never did a antibody test because I self-isolated for most of the time and never met people without a mask, so I initially thought I was just developing an allergy. Multiple doctors tried to find out what was wrong but all tests where pointing to me being very healthy. Then I got my second mRNA shot in July and all those symptoms went away, like magic. Very weird for me and maybe I had long covid and what you described happened.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Long Haul symptoms are virtually the same as Beri-Beri or extreme vitamin B1 deficiency. Just saying. Further: PCR tests are non-specific even when you keep the cycle count down - they show positive for BOTH Covid and Flu which is why flu "disappeared" in 2020: PCR tests were positive flu and was judged as Covid.

throw-away_42 5y ago
> Further: PCR tests are non-specific even when you keep the cycle count down - they show positive for BOTH Covid and Flu which is why flu "disappeared" in 2020: PCR tests were positive flu and was judged as Covid. False. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210730/Claims-that-CDCe28099S-PCR-test-cane28099t-tell-covid-from-flu-are-wrong.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210730/Claims-that-CDCe2...
digdugdirk 5y ago
That's completely inaccurate. PCR tests were specific for only Covid. They were extremely good at covid identification. A recent "recall" of PCR testing protocol was to introduce a new test that could perform identification of both Covid and/or flu. Link here, just the first non-technical one I found: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/pcr-test-recall-can-the-test-tell-the-difference-between-covid-19-and-the-flu https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/pcr-test-recall-can-the-te... Please be careful about what information you consume, and be even more careful about what information you convey to others.
- senectus1 5y ago
  This misunderstanding i feel comes from the deeply technocratic language that the CDC uses for public relations posts... it makes it super easy for social media to misunderstand and spread in the form of FUD, I've seen a lot of it in the last month or so.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    No. You are blaming the experts in epidemiology for not being able to overcome political agendas, cable news propaganda, ignorant people, and a lack of trust in “the establishment” (which includes the FDA and CDC) caused by all of the above. The PR article was for medical professionals. Americans on social media have become far too gullible. They can’t be bothered to fact check and they sure aren’t going to the source material. This is not a problem the CDC’s comma team could have prevented.

wincy 5y ago

My wife coughed for almost a year. A YEAR. Awful coughing that hurt my ears when I was nearby. Never anything coming up. Just coughing and coughing and coughing. One day it finally stopped. I had a chest x-ray last year because my chest hurt. Nothing showed up. It kept hurting. For a year every day when I’d wake up my right chest hurt. It hurt a little bit to breathe for almost a year. Eventually I realized if I sort of flexed in a weird way tensing up the muscles I could breathe without it hurting. So I started doing that, and one day that pain stopped. I don’t know if these were symptoms of long haul Covid but they were certainly bizarre things to have happen, and it seemed like a major coincidence for it to happen during the Covid-19 pandemic.

stickfigure 5y ago
I had similar symptoms. Scary persistent cough for something like six months. Finally got chest xrays. Doctor called and left a message - "we found something on your xrays, give us a call". That was on a Friday, and the office wasn't open till Monday. I spent the weekend mentally preparing my will. When I finally talked to the guy: "General lung irritation, possibly due to postnasal drip, take a sample of this anti-allergy nasal spray". I think I used it once or twice, but mainly it just cleared up all on its own. This was a dozen years ago, long before covid. I guess what I'm saying is: There were a million problems your body could have before covid, most of them not life threatening, and those issues are still around even with this scary disease running rampant.
Barrin92 5y ago
reminds me of pertussis, awful cough going on for months. Although quite rare in the US nowadays.

nradov 5y ago

It's hard to take this study seriously when there were no proper controls and many of the symptoms are non specific. They reported anxiety as one of the most common "long COVID" symptoms, but according to the NIMH something like a fifth of US adults have anxiety in any given year. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...

koolba 5y ago
> … but according to the NIMH something like a fifth of US adults have anxiety in any given year. That has to be significantly higher after 20 months of “breathe and your dead!” news coverage.
criticaltinker 5y ago
FWIW the researchers acknowledged this in the cited paper: > because stress/anxiety is a symptom that many persons may be experiencing due to the pandemic, and not due to COVID-19 per se, we quantified the number of individuals who experienced stress/anxiety as their only symptom > We found that only 6 participants reported stress/anxiety as their sole symptom, demonstrating that our PASC prevalence is not driven by this non-specific symptom. That said, completely agree that the study is fairly low quality and has many confounding factors, see my other responses here for further commentary.

sunkenvicar 5y ago

I encourage any suffering long haulers to check out flccc.net . They maintain a list of doctors in the US willing to prescribe therapeutics.

djmips 5y ago

Post viral illness damage has been known for a long time, for example post polio. I feel like there's probably been a host of other viral illness that could also be responsible for long Covid like symptoms but it's only with Covid that we are seeing it being in the public consciousness. The preexisting conditions may confound the study

rSi 5y ago

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons can't be access from within the EU because of GDPR

haspoken 5y ago

https://archive.is/1yleY https://archive.is/1yleY