“We in the medical field are very accustomed to taking care of respiratory syncytial virus and other pneumoviruses in young adults,” Wesley Self, MD, MPH, an emergency medicine physician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said in an interview. Why some previously healthy, often young, adults still haven’t recovered from the disease has stymied physicians. “They were pretty sick, but still at home.” “Most of the patients that I see who are suffering from syndrome were not hospitalized,” Jessica Dine, MD, a pulmonary specialist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, said in an interview. What’s unusual about the long haulers is that many initially had mild to moderate symptoms that didn’t require lengthy hospitalization-if any-let alone intensive care. And yet, the authors wrote, primary care physicians have little evidence to guide their care.Īdults with severe illness who spend weeks in intensive care, often intubated, can experience long-lasting symptoms, but that’s not unique to patients with COVID-19. Overall, approximately 10% of people who’ve had COVID-19 experience prolonged symptoms, a UK team estimated in a recently published Practice Pointer on postacute COVID-19 management. The patients’ average age was around 40 years, and women outnumbered men 4 to 1.Īs with SARS, many COVID-19 long haulers are health care workers who had massive exposure to the virus early in the pandemic, neuroimmunologist Avindra Nath, MD, of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), noted in a recent editorial. Physicians at a Paris hospital recently reported that they saw an average of 30 long haulers every week between mid-May, when the COVID-19 lockdown ended in France, and late July. All had been hospitalized, with their stays averaging about 2 weeks 80% hadn’t received any form of ventilation. In a recent JAMA research letter, 125 of 143 Italian patients ranging in age from 19 to 84 years still experienced physician-confirmed COVID-19–related symptoms an average of 2 months after their first symptom emerged. But only 8096 people were diagnosed with SARS worldwide-a fraction of the COVID-19 cases reported each day in the US alone. Some people who were hospitalized with SARS still had impaired lung function 2 years after their symptoms began, according to a prospective study of 55 patients in Hong Kong. That appeared to be the case with the first severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and was also caused by a coronavirus. “Anecdotally, there’s no question that there are a considerable number of individuals who have a postviral syndrome that really, in many respects, can incapacitate them for weeks and weeks following so-called recovery and clearing of the virus,” Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in July during a COVID-19 webinar organized by the International AIDS Society. The longer the pandemic drags on, the more obvious it becomes that for some patients, COVID-19 is like the unwelcome houseguest who won’t pack up and leave. She serves as an administrator of 2 “Long Haul COVID Fighters” Facebook groups, whose members now number more than 8000. Lockman considers herself to be a “long hauler,” someone who still hasn’t fully recovered from COVID-19 weeks or even months after symptoms first arose. “My brain just feels like there’s a fog.” “I joke, ‘Well, COVID has eaten my brain, because I can’t remember how to remember words, keep track of medication,’” she said. She places the blame squarely on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Shared Decision Making and Communicationįive months, 16 emergency department trips, and 3 short hospitalizations later, Lockman can’t remember a lot of things.Scientific Discovery and the Future of Medicine.Health Care Economics, Insurance, Payment.Clinical Implications of Basic Neuroscience.
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