The study’s findings were a mix of good and bad news, said study senior author Paul Harrison, professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford. Among the reassuring aspects was the quick resolution of symptoms such as depression and anxiety.
“I was shocked and relieved by how quickly the psychiatric sequel went down,” Harrison said.
David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York, who has been studying the lasting effects of the coronavirus since the early days of the pandemic, said the study revealed some very disturbing results.
“This allows us to see without a doubt the emergence of significant neuropsychiatric sequelae in individuals who had COVID and far more frequently than in those who did not,” he said.
Because it focused only on the neurological and psychiatric effects of the coronavirus, the study authors and others emphasized that this is not strictly long-term COVID research.
“It would be overbearing and unscientific to make the immediate assumption that everyone [study] The cohort had Covid for a long time,” Putrino said. But the study, he said, “informs long-term COVID research.”
Between 7 million and 23 million people in the United States, according to recent government estimates, have chronic COVID-19—a catchall term for a wide range of symptoms including fatigue, breathlessness, and anxiety that occur weeks after an acute infection subsides. and persists even after months. Those numbers are expected to rise as the coronavirus settles into an endemic disease.
The study was led by Maxim Taquet, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford who specializes in using big data to shed light on psychiatric disorders.
Researchers matched nearly 1.3 million patients diagnosed with COVID-19 between January 20, 2020 and April 13, 2022, with a similar number of patients who had other respiratory diseases during the pandemic. The data, provided by electronic health records network TriNetX, came largely from the United States, but also included data from Australia, Britain, Spain, Bulgaria, India, Malaysia and Taiwan.
The study group, which included 185,000 children and 242,000 older adults, revealed that the risks varied by age, with those 65 and older at greatest risk of lasting neuropsychiatric effects.
For those aged 18 to 64, a particularly significant increased risk was of persistent brain fog, affecting 6.4 percent of people who had covid, compared to 5.5 percent in the control group.
Six months after infection, the children were not found to be at increased risk of mood disorders, although they remained at higher risk of brain fog, insomnia, stroke and epilepsy. None of those effects were permanent for the children. With epilepsy, which is extremely rare, the increased risk was greater.
The study found that 4.5 percent of older people developed dementia in the two years following infection, compared to 3.3 percent of the control group. The 1.2-point increase in harmful diagnoses as dementia is particularly worrying, the researchers said.
The study’s reliance on a trove of unidentified electronic health data prompted some caution, especially given the difficult times of the pandemic. Long-term results can be hard to track when patients have sought care through many different health systems, including some outside the TriNetX network.
“I personally find it impossible to judge the validity or conclusions of data when the data source is shrouded in mystery and the sources of the data are kept secret by legal agreement,” said Yale scientist Harlan Krumholz, who developed an online Platform where patients can enter their health data.
Taquet said the researchers used several methods of assessing the data, including making sure it was already known about the pandemic, such as the decline in mortality during the omicron wave.
Also, Taquet said, “the validity of the data will be no better than the validity of the diagnosis. If physicians make mistakes, we will make the same mistakes.”
The study follows earlier research from the same group, which reported last year that a third of Covid patients experienced a mood disorder, stroke or dementia six months after infection.
Cautioning that it is impossible to make a complete comparison between the effects of more recent forms, including Omicron and its subtypes, which are currently driving the infection, and those that were prevalent a year or more ago, the researchers outlined some preliminary findings. : even though omicron caused less severe immediate symptoms, long-term neurological and psychiatric outcomes appeared to be similar to delta waves, indicating that the burden on the world’s health care systems may continue even with less-severe forms.
Hannah Davis, co-founder of the patient-led research associate who studied the long COVID, said the finding was worthwhile. “This goes against the statement that omicrons are lighter for longer COVIDs, which is not based on science,” Davis said.
“We see it all the time,” Putrino said. “Normal conversation keeps skipping long covid. The severity of the initial infection doesn’t matter when we talk about long-term sequelae ruining people’s lives. ,
Dan Keating contributed to this report.
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)