>>13388033>Given that there's no data to suggest the existence of Long CovidReally?
https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n853In a linked paper, Ayoubkhani and colleagues (doi:10.1136/bmj.n693) extract data from all UK general practice records linked to hospital admissions to explore the risks of readmission, death, and incidence of respiratory, cardiovascular, metabolic, kidney, and liver diseases in a mean time frame of 140 days after discharge of patients admitted with covid-19.2 Strikingly, one third of discharged patients were readmitted to hospital and one in 10 died (17.7% of those readmitted; D Ayoubkhani and A Banerjee, personal communication, 2021). Discharged patients had higher risks of new respiratory disease (6 times), major cardiovascular disease (3 times), chronic liver disease (2.8 times), chronic kidney disease (1.9 times), and diabetes (1.5 times) than matched controls from the general population. The risks were higher in those younger than 70 and in non-white individuals.
Another recent UK study showed that more than half of patients with covid-19 had long covid symptoms three months after discharge from hospital, with worse outcomes among those younger than 50, women, and those with higher pre-covid fitness levels.3 Similar burdens of persistent symptoms and multiple organ impairment have been reported in studies from other countries4 and have also been observed in patients with covid-19 who were not admitted to hospital.
In addition to the respiratory, cardiac, renal, and endocrine pathology shown by this population level study and others,24 clusters of patients seem to have features of immunological dysfunction, dysautonomia, mast cell dysfunction, and neurological diagnoses.3 This is a problem for management, as common long covid symptoms (fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, wheeze, inappropriate tachycardia, gastrointestinal disturbance, for example) have multiple differential diagnoses spread across multiple specialties.
