You ’ ve Heard of Long COVID. Long Flu Is a Health Risk, Too
Statistically, there’s a good chance you know somebody who has experienced Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms including fatigue, brain fog, and pain following a case of COVID-19. About 14% of U.S. adults report having had Long COVID at some point, according to federal data.
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But many people don’t realize that other viruses, even very common ones, can trigger similarly long-lasting and debilitating symptoms. A study published Dec. 14 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases focuses on the risk of developing “Long flu” after a severe case of influenza.
“We learned from COVID-19 that infections that are initially thought to cause only acute illnesses can cause chronic disease,” says co-author Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. That’s true of influenza as well, the new research shows.
Al-Aly and his colleagues used records from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to compare the long-term health outcomes of about 11,000 people hospitalized with influenza from 2015 to 2019 with those of about 81,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19 from 2020 to 2022. The researchers tracked how many people went on to develop any of 94 health risks associated with the two viruses in the year and a half after they were hospitalized.
Relative to influenza survivo...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Jamie Ducharme Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
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