Loss of smell. Fatigue. Mental health challenges. Difficulty breathing and other lower respiratory diseases. Fluid and electrolyte disorders. Cardiac dysrhythmia and other nonspecific chest pains. Trouble with urination. Diabetes?
Statistically, . The data, presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, can be used to guide diagnoses of long COVID, and may be the guide soon at Kaiser Permanente offices, Michael Horberg, MD, executive director of research, community benefit, and Medicaid strategy at the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Research Institute, said in an interview.
Medscape Illustration/Dreamstime/Getty Images
“There are some real conditions you could ask about” if you were evaluating a patient who believes they have PASC, Dr. Horberg said. “And there are real conditions that are symptoms patients have but they don’t fit the PASC diagnosis.”
That list is likely to evolve as specific symptoms emerge with new variants, he said. And there’s also the nationwide Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) trial being conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Horberg is withholding judgment on diabetes, though, until more data come in.
During the global pandemic, Dr. Horberg, an HIV physician by training, found himself writing policies and guidelines for Kaiser’s Mid-Atlantic States (KPMAS) COVID response. Not long after that, the reports of symptoms that have come to be called long COVID started to come in. But they were “a mishmash of things” – everything from binge eating to the skin condition vitiligo to cranial nerve impairment, along with the more common complaints like fever, insomnia, and shortness of breath.
So Dr. Horberg looked back through KPMAS patient charts and found 28,118 members who had received a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test result in 2020. Then he matched them 3:1 with 70,293 members who didn’t have a positive PCR. The majority were women, nearly half were younger than 50, more than 40% were Black, and 24.5% were Latinx. The majority met clinical definitions of overweight or obese and many had other chronic illnesses, including diabetes (18.7% in the COVID-positive group), chronic kidney disease (3%) and cancer (2.6%). Rates of chronic illnesses were similar between arms.
Then they went back to 4 years before each positive PCR test and looked for all the illnesses before COVID, all those that emerged within 30 days of COVID diagnosis and those illnesses that emerged between 1 and 3 months after diagnosis.
From that search, they found 15 symptoms that were more common among people who’d had COVID. In addition to the symptoms listed above, those included abdominal pain, other nervous system disorders, dizziness or vertigo, and nausea and vomiting. Then they looked at whether each patient had experienced those symptoms in the 4 years before COVID to see if they were, in fact, new diagnoses.
More than 1 in 10
About one in four people who’d had COVID reported symptoms they thought might be long COVID, but through the analysis, they found that only 13% actually developed new conditions that could be categorized as long COVID.