Pre-COVID stress may increase chances of long-term COVID

Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter

Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Scientists around the world are investigating why. long covid A new study finds that experiencing emotional distress before contracting COVID-19 may make symptoms more likely to last longer.

Researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston said they were surprised by the strength of the association between long-term COVID and depression, anxiety, worry, perceived stress and loneliness.

But the lead author of the study, Andrea Roberts, a senior research scientist in the school’s Department of Environmental Health, looked at long-term COVID cases and looked at other physical health conditions related to mental health. said he remembered. fibromyalgia Also Lyme disease.

“We know from patient studies depression And so on, there is a pattern of immune dysregulation, like inflammation in the blood,” says Roberts. We know that it is not suitable for repelling.

To study the impact of mental health on COVID-19 infection, researchers enrolled nearly 55,000 people in April 2020 and surveyed them about their levels of psychological distress just as the pandemic was developing. I asked.

About 3,000 of the participants contracted COVID-19 the following year. Researchers asked them about their symptoms and compared those who had COVID longer with those who didn’t.

The team found that emotional distress was associated with a 32% to 46% increased risk of developing long-term COVID and a 15% to 51% increased risk of disability.

Previous research involving Roberts showed that these same psychological factors are also associated with the risk of being hospitalized with COVID. She noted that the severity of COVID-19 has long been associated with her COVID-19.

Some hypotheses about prolonged COVID are that the immune system is not clearing the virus and that it is not clearing the virus as is the case in people without prolonged COVID, or that fragments of the virus are It remains in the human body and continues to activate the immune system. Roberts said.

“What we don’t know at the moment is if we reduce people’s stress or cure their depression or treat their depression well, whether the risk goes back to what it was before,” she explained.

Roberts said he is particularly concerned about cases where symptoms cause significant disability.

Losing her sense of smell and even having a mild cough may not be debilitating, she said.

“But if you’re too tired to work, that’s a whole different order,” Roberts said.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Estimate 20% of American adults have had COVID for a long time.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, said the findings generalized anxiety disorder It was a risk factor for the long-term development of COVID.

“I think this signal is growing stronger that there is likely some interaction between pre-existing mental illness and long-term COVID,” Adalja said. , more work needs to be done to figure out what the physiology is about how it occurs.”

Adalja said many questions remain about why and to whom the new coronavirus is causing long-term outbreaks. One of his problems is that he has a “definition problem.” Post-ICU syndrome It’s not just the long COVID, it’s the post-hospital syndrome, he pointed out.

COVID-19 appears to be more common in the elderly, women, and those with pre-existing medical conditions, including psychiatric problems. epstein barr virus is also possible. Prolonged COVID appears to be less common in vaccinated individuals, he added.

Meanwhile, blood tests have found no inflammation in these long-term COVID patients. echocardiography Or pulmonary function tests, Adalja said.

“The biggest problem is understanding what’s actually going on in these individuals’ bodies, what is the etiology of these symptoms, and how they relate to previous infections with COVID. said Adalja. “All we currently have is some associations that suggest understanding the cause, but not enough yet to truly understand it.”

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more information. long covid.

Source: Andrea Roberts, PhD, MPH, Senior Research Scientist, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Boston. Amesh Adalja, MD, Senior Fellow, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, Specialist, Infectious Diseases Society of America, Baltimore. JAMA Psychiatry7 September 2022, Online

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