What are the long-term effects of COVID-19 and other viral respiratory infections?

In a recent study published in open forum infectionsresearchers compared coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-specific long-term outcomes to other viral respiratory infections.

Background

Since the start of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, an increase in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) patients has caused long-lasting symptoms that last much longer than the typical duration of COVID-1. I have experience. 19 infection. While some symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath and brain fog have been widely reported, other long-term effects of COVID-19 remain unexplored.

Several cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neurological, musculoskeletal, immune-mediated, and metabolic manifestations may appear months after the duration of SARS-CoV-2 infection, indicating possible long-term respiratory effects. There is a nature. Better knowledge of the long-term effects of COVID-19 is needed to inform public health.

About research

In the present study, researchers investigated a diverse and large patient group to examine the health effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection occurring more than one month after infection.

The team examined information obtained from medical facility electronic medical records collated with the Cerner Real-World Data dataset. Claims data from pharmacies, microbiology laboratories, hospitalizations, and related patient care facilities may be included in patient visit information. All these data elements were time and date stamped to establish temporal links between clinical data and treatment patterns. This information is based on electronic medical records created before April 14, 2022.

COVID-19 patients were identified with the help of the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision and Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) code. Index encounters related to non-COVID-19 and COVID-19 patients were extracted from medical encounters recorded between 1 March 2020 and 1 April 2021.The index encounters associated with viral respiratory infections (VRI) populations are the flu, cold, or viral pneumoniaIt was described as the first medical encounter associated with each patient throughout the study period with any of the VRI ICD-10 codes. A third cohort without COVID-19 and VRI was also recruited from the period evaluated. Index encounters in this group were described as random events recorded during the same period as index encounters associated with the VRI and COVID-19 groups.

Propensity scores estimated using clinical and demographic factors were collated in patients belonging to three groups for comparison, VRI vs. COVID-19, COVID-19 vs. non-infected, and non-infected vs. Three independent concordant groups of VRI were generated.

result

Compared with common VRIs, COVID-19 at presentation is a significant predictor of diagnoses related to hair loss, palpitations, chest discomfort, dyspnea, obesity, and joint pain approximately 30 to 365 days after presentation. proved to be Only dyspnea and chest discomfort were significantly increased when comparing VRI patients with COVID-19 patients and control patients with COVID-19 patients. Pulmonary embolism, other respiratory failure, hypoxemia, oxygen dependence, and pneumonia were considerably more common in her COVID-19 patient than in the VRI patient, although he had SARS-CoV- This was not the case in 2 infected patients.

COVID-19 was not specifically correlated with long-term neurological sequelae in this study. Anosmia appeared to be significantly higher in COVID-19 and generic VRI patients, but was not significantly different between groups. Notably, the team he found no significant correlation between COVID-19 and depression/anxiety. Cognitive impairment was also higher in SARS-CoV-2-infected patients compared with VRI patients, but this correlation was not seen compared to control cohorts.

COVID-19 was uniquely associated with an increased likelihood of being diagnosed with palpitations. Tachycardia, heart failure, unexplained anemia, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension were more common in patients with COVID-19 than in her VRI patients, but not significantly higher than in the control cohort. was. Fatigue and joint discomfort were associated with his COVID-19, especially early. Her type 1 diabetes was diagnosed more in her COVID-19 patients than in her VRI patients, but no significant correlation was identified between COVID-19 patients and controls.

Conclusion

The results of this study identified seven diagnoses corresponding to SARS-CoV-2 infection when encountering index patients compared to index patients associated with common respiratory viral infections. The study also revealed that the duration of symptoms differed between COVID-19 and his VRI in general. The researchers believed that studies of long-term effects on each type of infection would change over time, giving potential for future research.