WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - People who suffered from Covid-19 are at a high risk of getting several health-related problems three years later, according to a report published in Nature Medicine.
'We tend to think of infections as mostly short-term illnesses with health effects that manifest around the time of infection. Our data challenges this notion. I feel COVID-19 continues to teach us - and this is an important new lesson - that a brief, seemingly innocuous or benign encounter with the virus can still lead to health problems years later,' said senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a Washington University clinical epidemiologist.
For the study, researchers from the Veterans Affairs or VA St. Louis Health Care System and Scripps Research followed up on 135,161 Covid-19 survivors and 5,206,835 controls in the VA system for three years to determine the risks of long-term Covid.
During the three years, 378.7 long Covid cases were reported per 1,000 people with increase in cases related to gastrointestinal, lung, and neurologic systems.
'We aren't sure why the virus's effects linger for so long,' said Al-Aly. 'Possibly it has to do with viral persistence, chronic inflammation, immune dysfunction or all the above.
The study also observed 20,297 hospitalized participants and 114,864 non-hospitalized participants, and found them to be at a 5 percent additional risk of suffering from long Covid symptoms.
'The problem is even worse for people with severe SARS-CoV-2 infection. It is very concerning that the burden of disease among hospitalized individuals is astronomically higher. COVID-19 is a serious threat to the long-term health and well-being of people and it should not be trivialized,' the senior author noted.
Earlier, many studies have claimed that Covid survivors are at comparatively higher risk of suffering from numerous cardiovascular conditions than unaffected people.
'Even three years out, you might have forgotten about COVID-19, but Covid hasn't forgotten about you,' Al-Aly concluded. 'People might think they're out of the woods, because they had the virus and did not experience health problems. But three years after infection, the virus could still be wreaking havoc and causing disease or illness in the gut, lungs or brain.'
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