Majority of discharged Covid patients haven't fully recovered after five months says Leicester study
Seven in ten still show persistent symptoms
Last updated 24th Mar 2021
The majority of Covid survivors who left hospital did not fully recover five months after discharge and continued to experience negative impact on their physical and mental health, as well as their ability to work, according to the PHOSP-Covid study.
The UK-wide study, led by the National Institute for Health Research Leicester Biomedical Research Centre as well as Leicester and Loughborough Unis, analysed 1077 patients who were discharged between March and November last year.
Research showed the patients had an average of nine persistent symptoms with the most common being muscle pain, fatigue, physical slowing down, impaired sleep quality, joint pain or swelling, limb weakness, breathlessness, pain, short-term memory loss, and slowed thinking.
Mental health was also impacted with 25% of participants showing clinically significant symptoms of anxiety and depression and 12% showing signs of post-traumatic stress at their 5-month follow up.
Of the 67.5% of participants who were working before Covid, 17.8% were no longer working, and nearly 20% experienced a health-related change in their job.
Professor Chris Brightling, a professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Leicester and the chief investigator for the PHOSP-COVID study, said: “While the profile of patients being admitted to hospital with COVID-19 is disproportionately male and from an ethnic minority background, our study finds that those who have the most severe prolonged symptoms tend to be white women aged approximately 40 to 60 who have at least two long term health conditions, such as asthma or diabetes.”
Dr Rachael Evans, an associate professor at the University of Leicester and respiratory consultant at Leicester’s Hospitals, said: “Our results show a large burden of symptoms, mental and physical health problems and evidence of organ damage five months after discharge with COVID-19. It is also clear that those who required mechanical ventilation and were admitted to intensive care take longer to recover. However, much of the wide variety of persistent problems was not explained by the severity of the acute illness - the latter largely driven by acute lung injury - indicating other, possibly more systemic, underlying mechanisms.”
Professor Louise Wain, GSK/British Lung Foundation Chair in Respiratory Research at the University of Leicester and co-investigator for the PHOSP-COVID study, said: “When we looked at the symptom severity of patients five months after they were discharged from hospital, we found that in all but the mildest cases of persistent post-COVID symptoms, levels of a chemical called C-reactive protein CRP, which is associated with inflammation, were elevated.
“From previous studies, it is known that systemic inflammation is associated with poor recovery from illnesses across the disease spectrum. We also know that autoimmunity, where the body has an immune response to its own healthy cells and organs, is more common in middle-aged women. This may explain why post-COVID syndrome seems to be more prevalent in this group, but further investigation is needed to fully understand the processes. The evidence for different recovery ‘clusters’, and ongoing inflammation, really is important in guiding how we conduct further research into the underlying biological mechanisms that drive ‘Long-COVID’.”