Attributes and predictors of long COVID

By C. Sudre, B. Murray, Thomas Varsavsky, M. Graham, R. Penfold, R. Bowyer, J. C. Pujol, K. Klaser, M. Antonelli, L. Canas and 23 more. Nature Medicine, 2021

2,181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reports of long-lasting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) symptoms, the so-called ‘long COVID’, are rising but little is known about prevalence, risk factors or whether it is possible to predict a protracted course early in the disease. We analyzed data from 4,182 incident cases of COVID-19 in which individuals self-reported their symptoms prospectively in the COVID Symptom Study app1. A total of 558 (13.3%) participants reported symptoms lasting ≥28 days, 189 (4.5%) for ≥8 weeks and 95 (2.3%) for ≥12 weeks. Long COVID was characterized by symptoms of fatigue, headache, dyspnea and anosmia and was more likely with increasing age and body mass index and female sex. Experiencing more than five symptoms during the first week of illness was associated with long COVID (odds ratio = 3.53 (2.76–4.50)). A simple model to distinguish between short COVID and long COVID at 7 days (total sample size, n = 2,149) showed an area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic curve of 76%, with replication in an independent sample of 2,472 individuals who were positive for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. This model could be used to identify individuals at risk of long COVID for trials of prevention or treatment and to plan education and rehabilitation services. Analysis of data from the COVID Symptom Study app reveals fatigue, headache, dyspnea and anosmia as key attributes of long COVID, with those experiencing five or more symptoms during the first week of being at increased risk of prolonged disease.

Subfields: Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb87ec5c85fa1c7465835962fb7962d6519b82fd

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In Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine

In Neurology

S. Yong

Citations in the corpus

Characterising long COVID: a living systematic review (2021, background): “Using meta-regression, the proportion of female patients in the studies was positively associated with headache and smell and taste disturbance (online supplemental file 9), while the proportion of ICU patients in the studies was positively associated with muscle pain (online supplemental file 10).”
Incidence, co-occurrence, and evolution of long-COVID features: A 6-month retrospective cohort study of 273,618 survivors of COVID-19 (2021, methodology): “In an appbased cohort study with 4,182 cases of COVID-19, 13% of respondents self-reported longCOVID features, with some evidence for higher rates in women and older people [11].”
Long COVID or post-COVID-19 syndrome: putative pathophysiology, risk factors, and treatments (2021, background): “Another study tracked over 4000 COVID-19 survivors and identified factors that predicted long COVID, which include old age of over 70 years, more than five symptoms during the first week of illness, presence of comorbidities, and female sex [37].”