February 15, 2023 – After studying the symptoms of hundreds of individuals after COVID-19, researchers have found that vaccination could potentially reduce the danger of long-COVID disease.
The latest study, which checked out patients 3 months after their COVID-19 infection within the pre-Delta, Delta and Omicron variants, initially showed that long-COVID symptoms were more common within the pre-Delta era than within the Delta and Omicron eras. However, these differences between variants became less necessary when researchers took vaccination status into consideration, suggesting that the vaccine could play a key role in reducing long-COVID risk and mitigating symptoms.
Another necessary finding of the study, conducted by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and the University of California San Francisco and published within the journal Clinical infectious diseaseswas the sheer number of individuals reporting severe fatigue after COVID-19.
“Mild fatigue is very different from severe, life-disrupting fatigue,” lead creator Michael Gottlieb, MD, said at a press conference Wednesday. “One in eight people who got COVID had severe, persistent fatigue after three months. … That speaks to the impact we're experiencing as a society.”
The study included 2,402 COVID-positive and 821 COVID-negative individuals, with 463 falling into the pre-Delta category, 1,198 during Delta, and 741 during Omicron.
The authors didn’t weigh how severe the patients' initial COVID infections were in comparison with their ongoing symptoms, but Gottlieb told reporters that the group is currently working on a complementary survey study to find out whether there are parallels between the 2.
Gottlieb said the research team continues to observe patients after three months to see how their symptoms evolve. Some early data, he said, shows that patients' symptoms go each ways: For some individuals who have minimal symptoms at three months, symptoms may progress to severe ones at six months, and for others who’ve severe symptoms at three months, symptoms may improve at six months.
All of those open questions, including the role of reinfection in Long COVID, can be the main focus of Gottlieb's team's future research.
“We need to better understand Long COVID and define it better,” Gottlieb said. “Long COVID is not a single concept, there are different phenotypes and versions of it. As researchers, public health leaders and as a society, we need to better understand what people are going through.”