A Chinese study, published in the Lancet, has found that nearly 75% of patients hospitalized with COVID were still experiencing at least one symptom of the infection 6 months after getting discharged from the hospital.
Dr. Chaolin Huang of Jin Yin-tan Hospital in Wuhan, China, wrote, “Patients with COVID-19 had symptoms of fatigue or muscle weakness, sleep difficulties, and anxiety or depression,” and those with “more severe illness during their hospital stay had increasingly impaired pulmonary diffusion capacities and abnormal chest imaging manifestations.”
More than 60% of the patients reported fatigue or muscle weakness, which was the most common symptom. Other symptoms include difficulty sleeping, hair loss, and anosmia (loss of smell).
Overall, the study researchers found that 76% of those examined 6 months after getting discharge from Jin Yin-tan hospital reported having at least one symptom.
The team also found that symptoms were more common in women (81%) than men (73%). Nearly 66% of women and 59% of men had fatigue or muscle weakness.
In addition, women (28%) were more likely to report anxiety or depression at follow-up than men (18%).
Patients who had severe COVID-19 illness were 2.4 times as likely to report any symptom later than those who had mild to moderate levels of infection.
Dr. Huang and the team also reported that 56% of patients with severe coronavirus illness and 22% of those with mild to moderate illness had lung diffusion impairment.
The author wrote that in a different subset of 94 patients from whom plasma samples were collected, the “seropositivity and median titres of the neutralising antibodies were significantly lower than at the acute phase,” raising concern for reinfection.
The findings “support that those with the severe disease need post-discharge care. Longer follow-up studies in a larger population are necessary to understand the full spectrum of health consequences from COVID-19,” they added. This article appeared on Medscape Medical News.
