Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN)– Infection with “Covid-19” is a bad thing in itself. But, what if you were among the unlucky people to have suffered from what is known as “long-term Covid”?
And a new study, which included more than a million people from 8 countries, explained that it is a variety of symptoms that you can feel for months, and even years, after recovering from “Covid-19”.
The study found that adults’ risk of seizures, brain fog, dementia and other mental health conditions remains high two years after recovering from COVID-19.
Co-author Paul Harrison, professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, UK, said: “These are important findings, but they shouldn’t cause panic. We’re not talking about symptoms that are 10 or 100 times more common… I think the worst odds ratio is two or more. three”.
Children were more likely to have epilepsy or seizures, encephalitis and radiculopathy, which can cause pain, weakness, or loss of sensation in an arm or leg.
There was also a small, but worrisome, risk, upon diagnosis, of developing a mental disorder such as schizophrenia or delusional thinking.
“This is a very robust and well-executed study that uses data from a large sample, from multiple countries,” Rachel Sumner, a research fellow at Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, who was not involved in the study, told CNN.
“The findings are worrying and extremely important in our current context of the spread of COVID-19,” she added.
“I just spoke to a patient who was diagnosed with COVID-19 more than two years ago, but he only sees a post-Covid specialist,” said Dr. Aaron Friedberg, clinical assistant professor of internal medicine who works in the Post-Covid Recovery Program at Wexner Medical Center at The Ohio State University in Columbus. today”.
The doctor, who was not involved in the study, added: “This does not necessarily mean that they developed these symptoms after two years. It means that they were only diagnosed with them.”
Friedberg also said he sees people with severe symptoms two years after diagnosis.
He explained, “They can’t think or breathe.. There is one person who is very ill, who cannot get out of bed.. I finally saw someone who was still unable to work due to symptoms of Covid-19 two years after the diagnosis.”
Good and bad news
Two years of hospital data for both adults and children, which were pulled from the TriNetX electronic health records network, were analyzed for the study, which was published in The Lancet Psychiatry, Wednesday.
The study looked at 1.25 million patients two years after they were diagnosed with Covid-19, and compared them to 1.25 million people with various respiratory infections.
“We compared the two groups of patients for 14 major neuropsychiatric disorders in the two years following COVID-19 or respiratory tract infection,” said co-author Maxime Takee, an academic clinical fellow in psychiatry at the UK’s National Institute for Healthcare Research Biomedical Research.
The research team looked at the following conditions: anxiety disorders, mood disorders, insomnia, psychotic disorders, cognitive deficits, epilepsy or seizures, encephalitis, intracranial hemorrhage, stroke, Parkinson’s, Guillain-Barré syndrome, disorders of nerves, nerve roots and plexuses, and systemic diseases. Neuromuscular.
The researchers looked at deaths for causes, too.
Most of the patients were from the United States, but the study also included people from Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Bulgaria, India, Malaysia and Taiwan.
The study could not tell if people had had persistent symptoms for two full years since being diagnosed with COVID-19.
“These data look only at the number of new diagnoses being made, not the persistence or duration of symptoms,” said Tackett.
The news was good and bad.
For adults, the risk of “brain fog, dementia, psychotic disorders, epilepsy and seizures remains high over the two-year period” when compared to ‘people with other respiratory conditions,’ Takeh said.
The study said adults over the age of 65 had a 1.2% increased risk of being diagnosed with dementia.
Takeh added that there is some good news for adults: “The risk of developing some disorders, particularly anxiety and mood disorders, disappeared within two to three months, with no more cases over the two years.”
Overall, Sumner said, the evidence from the study was “particularly concerning,” because even milder COVID-19 mutants appear to have the same long-term results.
“Some of these disruptions will continue to delay diagnosis and treatment with healthcare systems struggling to deal with both COVID-19 infections and backlog patient waiting lists,” she added.