Critical care workers insert an endotracheal tube into a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) positive patient in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida, February 11, 2021.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
Some Covid-19 patients experience shortness of breath, fatigue, headaches and “brain fog” for months to nearly a year after their first illness. Now global medical experts are working to better diagnose and treat what they are currently calling “Long Covid.”
Earlier this week, the World Health Organization hosted a global meeting with “ patients, clinicians and other stakeholders ” to increase the agency’s understanding of what is medically referred to as post-Covid disease, aka Long Covid, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday.
The meeting was the first of many to come. The goal will ultimately be to create an “agreed clinical description” of the condition so that doctors can diagnose and effectively treat patients, he said. Given the number of people infected with the virus worldwide – nearly 108 million people on Friday – Tedros warned that many will likely experience these persistent symptoms.
“This disease affects patients with both severe and mild Covid-19,” Tedros said at a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. “Part of the challenge is that patients with long-term Covid can have a range of different symptoms that can be persistent or come and go.”
Limited data
So far, there is a limited number of studies that reveal the most common symptoms of Long-Covid or how long they can last. Most of the attention has been focused on people with serious or fatal illness, not those who have recovered but still report persistent side effects, also referred to as “long-haul vehicles”.
Most Covid patients are expected to recover within weeks of their initial diagnosis, but some have experienced symptoms for six months, or even nearly a year, medical experts say.
One of the largest global studies on Long Covid published in early January showed that many people suffering from persistent illness after infection are unable to go to work at full strength six months later. The study, which is published on MedRxiv and has not been peer-reviewed, surveyed more than 3,700 people ages 18 to 80 from 56 countries to identify the symptoms.
The most common symptoms experienced after six months were fatigue, post-exercise fatigue, and cognitive impairment, also known as brain fog, the study found.
Is this unique to Covid-19?
“We really don’t know what causes these symptoms. That’s a major focus of research at the moment,” said Dr. Allison Navis, a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine on Mount Sinai, on a phone call with the Infectious Diseases Society of America on Friday.
“There is a question whether this is something unique to Covid itself – and it is the Covid virus that causes these symptoms – or whether this could be part of a common post-viral syndrome,” Navis said, adding that medical experts see the same for a long time. – term symptoms after other viral infections.
Another study published in early January in the medical journal The Lancet studied 1,733 patients discharged from a hospital in Wuhan, China, between January and May last year. Of those patients, 76% reported at least one symptom six months after their first illness. The proportion was higher in women.
“We found that fatigue or muscle weakness, sleep problems, and anxiety or depression were common even 6 months after the onset of symptoms,” researchers wrote in the study.
They noted that the symptoms reported months after a person’s Covid-19 diagnosis were consistent with data previously found in follow-up studies of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which is also a coronavirus.
Post-Covid clinics are coming online
Some major medical centers are now creating post-Covid clinics to help patients with persistent symptoms. Navis said her clinic at Mount Sinai in New York City has treated a “fairly even” distribution of men and women with persistent disease, and that the average age of patients is 40, she said.
Dr. Kathleen Bell, a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said her hospital’s longstanding Covid-19 clinic began last April when a spate of infections hit Italy and New York early in the pandemic.
Bell said in the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s call on Friday that a range of professionals are needed to staff the clinics because symptoms are uneven, including experts who can treat muscle weakness, heart-related illness and cognitive problems for people with mental health problems. health problems after their diagnosis.
“In many ways, it really forces us to come together and make sure we have open lines of communication to address all these issues for patients,” Bell said.
Bell added that in January the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention organized a call with long Covid centers across the country to discuss their model for treating patients.
“I really think the CDC is now trying to bring centers together and get some clearer guidelines for this, which is very exciting,” Bell said.
– CNBCs Sam Meredith contributed to this report.