Long Covid 2 years after diagnosis: what are the risks?

“The findings are alarming and of great importance in the current context of the unmitigated Covid epidemic,” she added in an email.

“I just spoke to someone who was first diagnosed with Covid over two years ago, but today he only looks like a post-Covid expert,” said Friedberg, who was involved in the study. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re having those symptoms two years later. It just means they’ve been diagnosed with them.”

Friedberg also said he sees people suffering from severe symptoms two years after diagnosis.

“They can’t think, they can’t breathe. There are people who are so sick they basically can’t get out of bed,” he said. “Recently, I saw someone who was still out of work two years later due to COVID-19 symptoms.”

good news and bad news

The study looked at 1.25 million patients two years after their Covid-19 diagnosis and compared them with a closely matched group of 1.25 million who had another respiratory infection.

“We compared these two patient groups on 14 major neurological and psychiatric disorders two years after Covid-19 or a respiratory infection,” co-author, National Institutes of Health Psychiatry. said Maxime Taquet, Academic Clinical Fellow at . His Research Biomedical Research Center in the UK.

Most of the patients were from the United States, but the study also included people from Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Bulgaria, India, Malaysia, and Taiwan.

The study did not know whether symptoms persisted two full years after being diagnosed with Covid-19. “The data looked only at the number of new diagnoses, not the duration or duration of symptoms.”

The news was good and bad.

For adults, “the risk of developing brain fog, dementia, psychotic disorders, epilepsy and seizures remains elevated over two years compared to people with other respiratory diseases,” Taquet said. rice field.

Adults aged 65 and over had a 1.2% increased risk of being diagnosed with dementia. “It’s very clear that this is not a tsunami of new dementia cases, but given the severity of the consequences of dementia diagnoses, I find it hard to ignore.

There is also good news for adults, Take added.

impact on children

There was also good news for children. Also, no child was at increased risk of being diagnosed with anxiety or depression “even in the first six months” after Covid-19.

However, there were disturbing findings regarding other conditions. For example, children “have a two-fold higher risk of epilepsy and seizures” and “have a psychotic disorder diagnosed within two years of developing Covid compared to children diagnosed with another respiratory tract infection.” three times higher risk of being

In a study of 10,000 children diagnosed with Covid-19, 260 developed epilepsy and seizures within two years, compared with 130 of 10,000 children diagnosed with another respiratory tract infection. It was “a two-fold increase in risk”.

Two years after Covid-19 infection, children’s risk of being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder increased three-fold, Taquet said. Yet “the absolute risk is still very low,” he said, with 18 of his 10,000 children diagnosed with psychosis.

“I think the small increase in reported dementia and psychosis needs to be interpreted with caution,” said Paul Garner, Emeritus Professor of Evidence Synthesis in Global Health at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK. Stated. Garner was not involved in this study.

“In my opinion, these are more likely to be related to the social upheavals and dystopias we have lived through than the direct effects of the virus.

long term impact

Overall, the evidence from this study is “particularly disturbing,” said Cardiff’s Sumner.

Additionally, “some of these diseases will continue to be delayed in diagnosis and treatment by healthcare systems struggling to cope with both Covid infections and backlogs of patient waiting lists,” Sumner added. I got

That reality aligns with the clinical experience of doctors like Friedberg, who have been treating long-term Covid patients since the early days of the pandemic.

“I have had a severe post-Covid (patient) from my heirloom strain since March 2020 and have had the same with people who had it a few months ago. So I think any of these subspecies could be equally serious,” he said.

Still, Friedberg told CNN that there is “zero public policy decision” about what happens after COVID-19.

“The idea that something terrible might be happening that we won’t recognize until months or years later isn’t adequately addressed,” Friedberg said.

“Kids can’t run as well as they used to, they now have seizures, adults are so foggy that they can’t do work tasks, and they’re having a hard time caring for their kids at home. , they have chronic shortness of breath.

“For example, when it starts happening to 5% of the population every time there is a wave of Covid, it starts to add up.”