Read more

November 04, 2021
1 min read
Save

COVID-19 symptoms present after 1 year in half of patients at NJ medical center: Study

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Nearly half of patients who had COVID-19 and received treatment at a New Jersey medical center still experience persistent symptoms 1 year later, according to research presented at the CHEST Annual Meeting.

The single-institution, prospective cohort study included 173 patients who were diagnosed with COVID-19 (mean age, 51.5 years; 50.5% women) and admitted to the hospital or tested positive in the outpatient setting from March to April 2020. All patients were aged at least 18 years and had COVID-19 confirmed via polymerase chain reaction testing within the St. Joseph’s Health Network in Paterson, New Jersey.

COVID-19
Source: Adobe Stock.

Patients were contacted by telephone during March and April 2021 and completed a survey to obtain information on persistent symptoms directly associated with their previous COVID-19 diagnosis. Researchers also evaluated the odds of developing long COVID and controlled for age, gender, obesity and the prevalence of one or more comorbidity. Hypertension was present in 39.5% of patients, obesity in 26.9%, diabetes in 19.1%, asthma in 14.5%, coronary artery disease in 5.2% and COPD in 1.7%.

“In our study, nearly half — 47.9% — of the patients still experience persistent symptoms they developed a year ago after their diagnosis with COVID-19,” Christopher Millet, DO, an internal medicine resident at St. Joseph’s University Hospital, Paterson, New Jersey, said during the presentation.

The most common symptoms reported were:

  • shortness of breath (25.4%);
  • fatigue (21%);
  • anxiety (20.8%); and
  • brain fog (18.5%).

Patients treated in the outpatient setting were more likely to experience shortness of breath (31.7% vs. 19.8%), fatigue (24.4% vs. 23.1%), anxiety (20.7% vs. 20.9%), difficulty focusing/brain fog (26.8% vs. 10%) and memory loss (19.6% vs. 9.9%) compared with the inpatient group, Millet said.

Researchers observed no significant difference in development of long COVID between the inpatient and outpatient groups in unadjusted (OR = 0.941; 95% CI, 5.18-1.709) and adjusted (OR = 0.907; 95% CI, 0.459-1.789) models.

Reference: