We use the qualification ‘in UK’ because that’s where the study took place. Although we have no reason to believe the situation is different elsewhere. The researchers concluded Long COVID could become the norm in UK after a one-year longitudinal study. They also made the deeply concerning remark ‘No effective pharmacological or non-pharmacological interventions exist for patients with Long COVID’.
The Evidence Long COVID Could Become the Norm
The researchers published their report in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal on April 23, 2022. They will also be presenting it at European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in July 2022. The team studied medical outcomes of 2,300 hospitalized COVID patients between March 2020 and April 2021, and discovered the following:
1… Women were 33% less likely to recover completely compared to men.
2… Obese people were half as likely to recover fully compared to the rest.
3… Those on ventilator treatment had a 42% chance of recovering fully.
4… Just 26% reported they were back to normal after five months.
5… That number improved to 28.9% after a complete year had passed.
More Conclusions Researchers Reached During the Study
Study co-leader Rachel Evans of National Institute for Health and Care Research told Science Alert the results were ‘striking’. The ‘limited recovery’ of their subjects five months to one year after hospitalization affected several lifestyle factors, she said. These included mental health, exercise capacity, organ impairment, and quality of life.
However, the commonest lingering symptoms suggesting Long COVID could become the norm included fatigue, muscle pain, poor sleep, slowing down physically, and breathlessness.
Her colleague Christopher Brightling called for more effective treatments to prevent the syndrome becoming ‘a highly prevalent new long-term condition’. We believe we should do everything we can to prevent this becoming the norm in North America too.
Research
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