At Least 20% of People Who Get COVID-19 Develop Lingering Conditions, CDC Study Says

By now, it’s abundantly clear that COVID-19 is not always an illness that clears quickly and leaves no trace. Millions of people in the U.S., and even more around the world, have Long COVID, the name for symptoms that last months or even years after an infection. Now, a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) helps quantify just how often COVID-19 is linked to subsequent health issues. Among U.S. adults younger than 65 who have had COVID-19, roughly one in five has developed a health condition that may be related to the virus, the report says. Among people 65 or older, about one in four has. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] To reach those findings, CDC researchers used electronic health records to track more than 350,000 U.S. adults who had confirmed COVID-19 cases. They tracked these people for up to a year after their diagnoses to see if they developed at least one of 26 conditions linked to post-COVID-19 illness—including heart disease, respiratory problems, asthma, kidney disease, neurologic conditions, diabetes, and mental health conditions. For comparison, they also tracked a group of 1.6 million U.S. adults who had not had COVID-19, but sought medical care for other reasons during the study period. More from TIME From that comparison, it was clear that COVID-19 survivors were at increased risk of developing almost all of the 26 conditions. The most dramatic risk differences between COVID-19 survivors and the ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news