Damage to the organs of the body, including the lungs and kidneys, is common in people who were admitted to hospital with Covid, with one in eight people with heart inflammation, the researchers said.
As the pandemic progressed, it became clear that some people who had Covid were left with continued symptoms, a condition that has been called Covid for a long time.
Previous studies have shown that less than a third of patients who have continued symptoms of Covid after being hospitalized with the disease feel fully recovered a year later, while some experts have warned that Covid could cause a long-term generation affected by disability.
Now, researchers who are monitoring the progress of patients who were treated at the hospital by Covid say they have found evidence that the disease can affect several organs.
In addition, they say that the severity of the ongoing symptoms seems to be related to the severity of the Covid infection itself.
“Even healthy, fit people can get serious Covid-19 disease, and to prevent this, members of the public should accept the vaccination offer,” said Professor Colin Berry, of the University of Glasgow, which ran CISCO-19 (Cardiac). image in the study of Sars-19 coronavirus disease).
“Our study provides objective evidence of abnormalities one to two months after Covid-19 and these findings relate to persistent symptoms at that time and the likelihood of ongoing health needs a year later,” Berry added. .
Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, the researchers describe how they tracked the results of 159 people hospitalized with Covid between May 2020 and March 2021.
The team performed a series of scans and blood tests between 28 and 60 days after Covid patients were discharged, and patients also received questionnaires to complete. The results were compared with those of a control group of 29 people with similar age, sex, ethnicity, and cardiovascular risk factors, who had not had Covid.
The authors write that, compared to controls, those who had been hospitalized with Covid showed several abnormalities, including the results of images of the heart, lungs, and kidneys.
The team found that about 13%, or one in eight, of those hospitalized with Covid were considered by experts to be very likely to have myocarditis or heart inflammation, compared with only one control participant. This led to a “lower health-related quality of life, a higher perception of the disease, higher levels of anxiety and depression.” [and] lower levels of physical activity, “said Dr Andrew Morrow, also from the University of Glasgow.
The likelihood of myocarditis was higher among health care workers and those with acute kidney injury, as well as those with more severe disease requiring invasive ventilation.
“These findings reinforce the importance of both the vaccine program and new treatments that have greatly reduced the number of serious cases of Covid-19,” Morrow said.
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The results also reveal that those who had been hospitalized with Covid were more likely to need outpatient secondary care or be referred for long-term Covid-compatible symptoms, with deaths and rehospitalizations also much higher in this group.
Dr Betty Raman, a longtime Covid cardiologist and expert at Oxford University who did not participate in the study, said the study provided important information on the prevalence of clinically assigned myocarditis and its association with Prolonged symptoms in those hospitalized with Covid in the early days of the pandemic.
However, Raman noted that the presence of persistent heart inflammation was not assessed during follow-up, few participants had received a Covid stroke, and the variants of Covid involved are unlikely to be the Omicron lineages that predominate today.
“Current estimates of myocarditis after newer variants of Sars-CoV-2 in the post-vaccine era may differ from this study, given the lower risk of hospitalization and serious illness attributable to differences in variants and the effects of the vaccine, “he said.