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