T E X T Nearly Half of Covid Patients Haven’t Fully Recovered Months Later, Study Finds A study of tens of thousands of people in Scotlan...
T E X T
Nearly Half of Covid Patients Haven’t Fully Recovered Months
Later, Study Finds
A study of tens of thousands of people in
Scotland found that one in 20 people who had been sick
with Covid reported not recovering at all, and another
four in 10 said they had not fully recovered from their
infections many months later.
The authors of the study, published in the journal
Nature Communications, tried to home in on the longterm risks of Covid by comparing the frequency of
symptoms in people with and without previous Covid
diagnoses.
People with previous symptomatic Covid
infections reported certain persistent symptoms, such
as breathlessness, palpitations and confusion or
difficulty concentrating, at a rate roughly three times as
high as uninfected people in surveys from six to 18
months later, the study found. Those patients also
experienced elevated risks of more than 20 other
symptoms relating to the heart, respiratory health,
muscle aches, mental health and the sensory system.
The findings strengthened calls from scientists
for more expansive care options for long Covid patients
in the United States and elsewhere, while also offering
some good news.
The study did not identify greater risks of long
term problems in people with asymptomatic
coronavirus infections. It also found, in a much more
limited subset of participants who had been given at
least one dose of Covid vaccine before their infections,
that vaccination appeared to help reduce if not
eliminate the risk of some long Covid symptoms.
People with severe initial Covid cases were at
higher risk of long-term problems, the study found. “The
beauty of this study is they have a control group, and
they can isolate the proportion of symptomatology that
is attributable to Covid infection,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly,
chief of research at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System
and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in
St. Louis, who was not involved in the research. “It also
tracks with the broader idea that long Covid is truly a
multisystem disorder,” Dr. Al-Aly said, one that resides
“not only in the brain, not only in the heart — it’s all of
the above.”
Jill Pell, a professor of public health at the
University of Glasgow who led the research, said the
findings reinforced the importance of long Covid
patients being offered support that extends beyond
health care and also addresses needs related to jobs,
education, poverty and disability. “It told us that Covid
can appear differently in different individuals, and it can
have more than one impact on your life,” Dr. Pell said.
“Any approach to supporting people has to be, firstly,
personalized and also holistic. The answer doesn’t just
lie within the health care sector.
Long Covid refers to a constellation of problems
that can plague patients for months or longer after an
infection. Over the last year, researchers have given
more attention to understanding the daunting
aftereffects as the number of Covid cases exploded and
health systems learned to better manage the initial
stages of an infection. U.S. government estimates have
indicated that between 7.7 million and 23 million people
in the United States could have long Covid.
Globally, “the condition is devastating people’s
lives and livelihoods,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,
the director general of the World Health Organization,
wrote in an article for The Guardian. He called on all
countries to devote “immediate and sustained action
equivalent to its scale.”
The authors of the study in Scotland tracked
33,000 people who had tested positive for the virus
starting in April 2020 and 63,000 who had never been
diagnosed with Covid. In six-month intervals, those
people were asked about any symptoms they had,
including tiredness, muscle aches, chest pain and
neurological problems, and about any difficulties with
daily life.
Of those with previous Covid cases, 6 percent
said on their most recent follow-up survey that they had
not recovered at all and 42 percent said that they had
only partly recovered. Women, older people and those
living in poorer areas faced more serious aftereffects
from a Covid infection. So, too, did those with pre-
existing health problems, including respiratory disease
and depression.
Only a small portion of the study participants —
about 4 percent — had been vaccinated before their
infections, and many of those with only a single dose.
“We’re now really heavily reliant upon vaccination,” Dr.
Pell said, “which does confer some protection, but it’s
not absolute.”
Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/
UECE 2023.1 - QUESTÃO 79
According to Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, long Covid is a health disorder that affects
A) especially the lungs.
B) mostly heart arteries.
C) mainly the brain.
D) a multitude of systems.
QUESTÃO ANTERIOR:
GABARITO:
D) a multitude of systems.
RESOLUÇÃO:
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