Despite the plethora of symptoms reported by patients with long COVID, a new study points to just seven that are unique to the disease. However, some longtime COVID researchers and doctors who have treated the disease believe this list is far from exhaustive.
The goal of the study was to look for long-lasting COVID symptoms that appear or persist more than a month after initial infection and are distinct from symptoms of other common respiratory viruses, such as the flu or the common cold. To do this, the researchers used Cerner Real-World Data, a database containing information extracted from electronic medical records from 122 health systems in the United States.
They analyzed electronic health record data from more than 17,000 patients diagnosed with COVID before April 14, 2022; more than 17,000 patients diagnosed with a different respiratory virus between March 1, 2020 and April 1, 2021; and 15,694 people without a virus diagnosis but who sought health care between 2020 and 2022.
The researchers concluded that some symptoms typically associated with long COVID do not appear more often after COVID infection than they do with other respiratory viruses, according to the report published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.
Compared to other viral respiratory illnesses, long COVID was most strongly associated with:
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Heart palpitations (rapid beats, palpitations, or pounding)
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Hair loss
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Fatigue
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Chest pain
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Dyspnea (difficulty breathing)
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Articular pain
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Obesity in the post-infectious period
The hope is that this research will help patients and their doctors more easily recognize long COVID, study co-author Dr. Adnan Qureshi, a neurologist at the University of Missouri Health Care, told TODAY.com. . The research can help “health care providers know what they should be looking for,” adds Qureshi.
The spike in long COVID cases has taken the healthcare system by surprise, Qureshi says.
“We thought once you survived the acute infection, it would all be over,” he explains. “Now that survivability has improved a lot, it’s quite obvious that it’s not a one-time thing for many.”
“There has been a dramatic shift in disability and loss of productivity nationwide that is quite outside of what we expected,” Qureshi adds. “The entire healthcare system must prepare to meet this existing demand.”
Qureshi admits that the list of seven symptoms may not be the final word on the subject. “It’s a work in progress,” he says. “It is possible that some of the symptoms did not appear as significant in this analysis.”
Dr. Lawrence Purpura, director of the long-running COVID clinic at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told TODAY.com that the main strength of the new study is the number of patients it includes. But he adds that the study missed some of the cardinal symptoms of long COVID, aka post-COVID syndrome — most likely because of the underlying data. The main ones among these symptoms are:
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brain fog
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crippling fatigue
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Dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, which controls subconscious bodily functions, such as breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure
Autonomic nervous system dysfunction explains why some patients’ heart rates spike after climbing two or three steps, and that symptom may be what the authors of the new study call heart palpitations, Purpura says.
But there are many problems with using electronic medical records to draw conclusions about long COVID, Purpura says.
First, the study depends on doctors knowing enough about long COVID to correctly enter the disease diagnosis billing code into the patient’s chart, he says. Additionally, many patients with mild cases of COVID are not tested for COVID, so it is wrong to assume that the 15,694 patients in the control group never had COVID.
Due to the state of testing during the study period, people with severe illness were most likely to be tested for COVID by a healthcare provider.
“In my clinic, I see a lot of patients who have been fully vaccinated and have developed a prolonged case of long COVID, despite having a mild case of COVID,” Purpura says. “My worry is that by missing some of the key features of long COVID, we would be doing patients a disservice.”
David Putrino, Ph.D., director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System, told TODAY.com that, at this time, studies based on long COVID electronic medical records should not be considered. “as something other than a general assumption- generate working pieces.
“We must stop treating these studies as the be all and end all of science simply because of the large (number of patients) and despite serious methodological flaws,” he adds.
Like Purpura, Putrino found that the majority of people with long-lasting COVID symptoms had a mild case of COVID, so they were unlikely to have positive test results in their medical records.
He adds that one of the main symptoms missed by the new study is “exertional malaise”, the overwhelming fatigue that some patients feel after minor physical exertion. “It’s a cardinal symptom of the long COVID, and it’s been left out.”
Unfortunately, many health care providers don’t know how to treat this symptom, Putrino says. They think patients are out of shape because they are sick and just need to work to achieve a higher level of fitness, he adds.
“The reason they can’t walk a block isn’t because they spent two weeks on the couch recovering from COVID,” Putrino says. “They experience it because they have inflamed blood vessels, a lingering virus still running amok in the body,” and faulty mitochondria, the cells’ powerhouses that provide energy to basically keep the lights on. lit.
“If you try to exert yourself, it’s like someone poisoned you,” says Putrino. “You crash for weeks.”
This article originally appeared on TODAY.com
