People who survived Covid-19 early in the pandemic, before there were vaccines, continued to be at higher risk for a slew of health problems for up to two years after they got over their initial infections, a new study finds, and that was especially true if they were hospitalized.
These health problems include heart problems, blood clots, diabetes, neurologic complications, fatigue and difficulties with mental health and have come to be known collectively as long Covid.
When researchers tallied the risks for more than 80 different complications that are associated with long Covid, they translated the collective toll into a metric called a disability adjusted life year, or DALY. Each DALY represents one year of healthy life lost to illness. They found that long Covid generated more than 80 disability-adjusted life years, or DALYs, for every 1,000 people who weren’t hospitalized for their initial infection.
That means long Covid creates a higher burden of disability than either heart disease or cancer, which cause about 52 and 50 DALYs for every 1,000 Americans, respectively, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s
Global Burden of Disease study.
The study, which was
published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, looked at the medical records of nearly 140,000 veterans who survived for 30 days after getting a Covid-19 infection in 2020, and compared their health outcomes to nearly 6 million other patients in the VA health system who had no evidence of infection.
The study has some important caveats. On average, the people in the study were older, in their 60s, and almost 90% were male, so the findings may not translate to those who are younger or to women.
None of the people in the study were vaccinated at the time they were infected because the vaccines had not been developed yet, and there weren’t yet antiviral treatments targeted to Covid-19. Studies have since shown that vaccination and early treatment can help curb long covid risk.
www.medscape.com
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