But, with women, hormonal changes and menopause can also cause onset.” “We know, historically, viral illnesses can cause asthma onset, so COVID can cause asthma onset. “One that comes up all the time is asthma because asthma can develop at any point in life,” Reed said. That means it’s important for clinicians to obtain thorough medical histories to pinpoint when symptoms, such as dizziness, memory loss and headaches, started and when they worsened, she said. Lead Nurse Practitioner Lori Reed, who works at the Piedmont Pulmonary COVID Recovery clinic, said some patients dealing with preexisting conditions may be more aware of them after coronavirus infections. It’s often hard to determine whether health problems that emerge after a case of COVID are truly triggered by the virus. But they caution: Even if omicron is less likely to cause long-lasting symptoms, particularly for people who have been vaccinated, the actual number of long COVID sufferers will still grow due to the high infection rate. Some experts think that today’s omicron strains pose a lower risk for long COVID than previous variants. The study did not look at vaccination status.Ī growing number of studies suggest that getting a COVID vaccine can reduce - though not eliminate - the risk of longer-term symptoms. The health problems of about 21% of the younger COVID patients in the study, those ages 18 to 64, and nearly 27% of the older people, 65 and up, could be attributed to long COVID. The analysis found 38% percent of the COVID patients developed one or more new health problems, compared to 16% percent of the non-COVID patients. The agency compared those who had been infected with the coronavirus and those who had not. The CDC’s study evaluated electronic medical records for nearly 2 million people. At the time of their enrollment, patients had already been dealing with COVID symptoms for an average of 107 days.Įven people who have mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 infections can have new health problems crop up months after they’ve tested negative. In 2021, 60% of patients at the Emory and Grady long COVID clinics enrolled in a study aimed at gathering more information on the illness. The World Health Organization says people cross over into long COVID after symptoms persist for at least three months. The CDC defines long COVID, which it calls Post-COVID Conditions, as symptoms lasting four weeks or longer after infection. “As a physician, you really want to be able to provide a prognosis at least, at a minimum to be able to express to them, this is what you can expect.”īut doctors “don’t know enough to know what the course is going to be and who’s going to get better and who isn’t, and you don’t know enough about how to treat those that aren’t getting better,” she said.Īnd the world’s leading health organizations don’t even have a standard definition of what constitutes long COVID, Truong said. “It’s just very upsetting and really challenging,” Walker said. It’s often hard to offer satisfying answers to patients. Instead, the current approach is to deal with each symptom individually. What’s more, there is no specific treatment for long COVID. Scientists still do not know how the virus triggers such a wide range of problems, from minor to incapacitating, or why issues emerge in some patients but not in others, or what exactly the risk factors are for developing them. Walker now leads a long COVID study at Grady, which is part of a massive National Institutes of Health effort to find the connection between seemingly unrelated symptoms that have afflicted patients and confounded physicians. The times that people have cried in my office because they’re just so overwhelmed is like more than anything I’ve experienced before in clinical practice.” “I don’t want to paint the picture of everybody’s debilitated, but some people are, and it’s people that don’t expect it. Tiffany Walker, who has treated long COVID patients at Grady Memorial Hospital. “With COVID, we tend to think about the hospitalizations and deaths, and then we kind of stop there sometimes,” said Dr. Difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”).Difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, chest pain.Tiredness or fatigue that interferes with daily life.The CDC says the following symptoms are the most common for this complex and poorly understood condition: adults stricken with COVID-19 have developed conditions that could be considered long COVID, which the agency defines as symptoms lasting at least four weeks after infection. A recent CDC study says that 1 in 5 of U.S.
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