People who were suffering from various psychological stresses such as depression, anxiety, worry, and loneliness before being infected are at a greater risk of suffering from the symptoms of ‘long COVID’, a study has found. Long covid refers to various sequelae that persist for at least 3 months following the diagnosis.
According to foreign media on the 9th (local time), a research team at Harvard University’s School of Public Health in the United States followed and observed 54,960 people from April 2020 to November last year to analyze the association between psychological stress and Long Covid. These results were recently published.
The 54,960 subjects of the study were not infected with the coronavirus at the time of recruitment. The research team used the patient health questionnaire and the loneliness scale as evaluation tools, and the psychological stress range included depression, anxiety, stress, and loneliness. During the study, 3,193 people were confirmed with Corona, and the research team compared their long-covided status, symptoms, and duration.
The results showed that people who suffered from depression were 1.32 times more likely to suffer from long covid than those who did not. Those with anxiety symptoms were 1.42 times, and those with severe stress were 1.46 times. Also, those who experienced two or more of the psychological stressors at the same time had a 1.49 times higher risk of long covid. It was not related to smoking, asthma, or other behavioral habits.
The research team said, “It is surprising that the psychological distress before corona infection is very closely related to the increased risk of corona sequelae. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Psychiatry).
On the other hand, it is known that 1 in 3 corona infected people suffer from Long Covid symptoms. Last year, a study conducted by a joint research team at the University of Oxford and the National Institutes of Health (NIHR) in the UK on 270,000 recovered corona patients found that 37% of them suffered from long-term Covid-19 between 3 and 6 months following infection.
The most frequent symptoms were anxiety and depression, followed by dyspnea, chest and neck pain, fatigue, headache, cognitive impairment, and muscle pain. These cases were more common in critically ill patients, with an above-average incidence of 63.6% among those hospitalized. ‘Brain Fog’, which is a dazed state as if there is a fog on their head, also appeared more often.
Analysts have also found that 2 million people in the U.S. are unable to return to work due to the long covid. According to a report from the Brookings Institution, it is estimated that 16 million of the working-age population aged 18 to 65 are suffering from the long-term coronavirus, and 2 to 4 million are unable to go to work. He added that the loss of wages would amount to $170 billion a year.
