“The Lancet” on Saturday published a study of a cohort of more than 1,700 Chinese patients hospitalized in the spring of 2020 shows that 76% of them still suffered, six months later, from at least a symptom.
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Many people infected with SARS-CoV-2, whether hospitalized or not, suffer from various disorders, weeks or even months after infection. A study published Saturday, January 9 in The Lancet offers an overview of the scale of this worrying phenomenon, sometimes referred to as “Covid long”. The Chinese researchers who conducted it looked at the fate of 1,733 patients (52% of men of 57 years of median age), with a confirmed Covid-19, hospitalized at Jinyintan hospital in Wuhan (China ) between January 7 and May 29, 2020.
Six months after the onset of symptoms, 76% of patients discharged from hospital said they still had at least one symptom, with women being more affected . The most common were fatigue or muscle weakness (63%) and sleep disturbances (26%). Almost one in four (23%) said they were anxious or depressed during this time. In addition, more seriously ill patients more often had impaired lung function six months after symptom onset. Persistent renal dysfunction was also observed, which sometimes went undetected during hospitalization. The most severely affected patients also performed worse on a six-minute walk test, about a quarter of whom did not reach the lower limit of normal distance.
This work also involved 94 patients whose blood antibody levels were recorded at the height of the infection. Six months later, this level of neutralizing antibodies against the virus had fallen by more than half.
Late manifestations
According to the authors, this work constitutes the largest cohort study of hospitalized patients. However, they bring some downsides to the scope of these figures: “It is necessary to have a larger sample to better study these sequelae and to measure the level of antibodies for SARS-CoV-2”, they specify. . Above all, the general state of health of patients before infection was not necessarily precisely known, they point out, which complicates the interpretation of certain physiological or clinical examinations carried out after the infection.
“This study is interesting”, however believes Professor Dominique Salmon, infectious disease specialist at Hôtel-Dieu (AP-HP), in Paris, who opened a consultation devoted to these long forms, even if he is ” not so easy to say if these are symptoms related to the Covid itself or to prolonged hospitalization or to other factors. ”
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