Older patients, women, those with variety of early symptoms most at risk of 'long COVID,' paper suggests - CTV News

Older people, women and those with a wide range of symptoms in the first week of their illness appear to be most likely to develop "long COVID," according to a preprint paper posted online by researchers at King's College London on Wednesday.

The paper defines "long COVID" as having symptoms persist for more than four weeks, while a short duration of COVID-19 was defined as less than 10 days, without a subsequent relapse.

About 1 in 20 people with Covid-19, or 4.5%, are likely to experience symptoms for eight weeks or more, the preprint analysis of data from the COVID Symptom Study app showed.

When it came to the sets of symptoms reported, the research identified two main groups of long COVID-19 sufferers

While most of the people with COVID-19 in the study reported being back to normal in 11 days or less, about 1 in 7 reported symptoms lasting for at least four weeks, about 1 in 20 for at least eight weeks and about 1 in 50 for at least 12 weeks

Long COVID-19 sufferers were also twice as likely to report a relapse after they recovered compared with those who had "short COVID" (16% vs 8.4%)

About 1 in 5 adults older than 70, or 21.9%, who tested positive for coronavirus developed long COVID, compared with about 1 in 10 18- to 49-year-olds, the study found

Women were more likely to suffer from long COVID than men -- at 14.9% of women compared to 9.5% of men -- but only in the younger age group

People who developed long COVID also had a slightly higher average BMI than those with short COVID, according to the paper

The researchers also found that people with asthma were more likely to develop long COVID, but found no clear links to any other underlying health conditions

The researchers used the information to develop a model to predict who is most at risk of long COVID based on their age, sex, and count of early symptoms

Statistical tests showed that this simple prediction was able to detect more than two thirds (69%) of people who went on to get long COVID (sensitivity), and 73% effective at avoiding false alarms (specificity)

The team then tested this model against an independent dataset of 2,472 people who reported a positive coronavirus antibody test result with a range of symptoms and found that it gave similar predictions of risk

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Older patients, women, those with variety of early symptoms most at risk of 'long COVID,' paper suggests