The risk of long-term COVID disease and its persistent symptoms occur very differently in different populations, according to a study that suggests more research is needed to accurately define the disease and improve diagnosis and treatment.
A study recently published in the journal Nature Communications analyzed electronic health records in the US to better understand the persistence of symptoms after infection with SARS-CoV-2, also known as long-term COVID, among a broad and diverse population.
“Long COVID is a new disease that is very complicated and quite difficult to characterize,” said Chengxi Zang, instructor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine, USA and lead author of the study.
“It affects multiple organs and poses a serious burden to society, so it is urgent that we define this disease and determine how well that definition applies to different populations. This paper provides a basis for further research on long-term COVID,” said Zang.
The team studied electronic health records from two clinical research networks that are part of the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet). One data set included data from 11 million patients from New York, while the other included 16.8 million patients from Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
The team identified a broad list of diagnoses that occurred more frequently in patients who had recently experienced COVID-19 than in uninfected individuals.
The researchers also found more types of symptoms and a higher risk of long-term COVID in New York than in Florida.
Specific conditions found in the New York City and Florida populations included dementia, hair loss, ulcers in the stomach and small intestine, blood clots in the lungs, chest pain, abnormal heartbeats and fatigue, they said.
“Our approach, which uses machine learning with electronic health records, provides a data-driven way to define long COVID and determine how generalizable our disease definition is,” Zang said.
Comparison of records across different populations in regions that experienced the COVID-19 pandemic differently highlighted how variable the time of COVID is for patients and highlighted the need for further investigation to improve diagnosis and treatment of the disease.
Some of the differences between the results from the two populations may be explained by the fact that New York City had a more diverse patient population, endured one of the first waves of the pandemic, and faced a shortage of personal protective equipment such as masks. with Florida, Zang adde.
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