Long-Term COVID: St. Joseph's Health Physicians Publish Study

A team of researchers at St. Joseph's Health in Paterson, NJ, recently published the results of a two-year Long COVID study in Clinical Microbiology and Infection, a top infectious disease journal. This is the first two-year Long COVID-19 study that included patients with mild to moderate symptoms in the US to be published. The study found that 23 % of patients still experience persistent symptoms two years after infection with COVID-19. In addition, women suffered more persistent long-term symptoms compared to men.

“Our study is the first to show that even patients with only mild COVID-19 infections can still have persistent symptoms after two years,” said Christopher Millet, DO, one of the researchers on the study. “The only other two-year study to date included patients who were hospitalized with moderate to severe COVID infections. Our study included both hospitalized and individuals with mild COVID-19 infections.”

In total, 173 individuals participated in this study, 91 of whom had been hospitalized. The most common ethnicity was Hispanic and almost 40% suffered from hypertension. At 12 months, 50.8% of the patients experienced at least one persistent symptom and, after 24 months, 23.1% of the patients were still experiencing at least one persistent symptom. Symptoms included shortness of breath, fatigue, anxiety, difficulty focusing/brain fog and memory loss.

The full study (published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection June 2022) is available at https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(22)00321-4/fulltext#secsectitle0015.