The risk of experiencing such health issues as diabetes, fatigue or blood clots can persist for at least two years after a coronavirus infection, a new study suggests.
Even two years after their infections, people who had COVID-19 were at higher risk for many health issues — ranging from heart disease to gastrointestinal problems, the team reports August 21 in Nature Medicine.
Patients who were hospitalized during their initial COVID-19 cases were more likely to experience these health problems, the team found. But those with milder initial infections were still at higher risk for about one-third of the medical issues that the scientists analyzed, compared with people who didn’t test positive. As most COVID-19 cases are milder, this group represents a greater burden to the health care system, says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at the Veterans Affairs Saint Louis Health Care System.
The most common problems align with common long COVID symptoms identified in other studies, such as fatigue, memory problems, loss of smell, blood clots, metabolic issues and gastrointestinal problems. For example, initially hospitalized patients were about 1.88 times as likely to experience acute gastritis, or stomach inflammation as those with no record of COVID-19 at two years after infection; non-hospitalized patients had a risk factor of 1.44 times.
2023-08-21 11:02:03
Post from www.sciencenews.org
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