A retrospective analysis of primary care records in the UK reveals individual symptoms associated with SARS-CoV-2 infections that persisted for 12 weeks or more post-infection, as well as risk factors associated with developing LongCOVID unibirmingham
We were unable to estimate the effect of vaccination and infection year on long COVID symptoms in our study due to the very short follow-up period among those vaccinated and infected in the year 2022 and 12 days, respectively) compared to those unvaccinated and infected in the year 2021 and 64 days, respectively).
Further research is needed to estimate the prevalence of persistent symptoms associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection among patients presenting to primary care. Much of the symptom data in primary care records is held in free-text entries rather than as clinically coded data. Natural language processing could be used to leverage these textual data to gain more accurate estimates of the prevalence of these symptoms.
The 50 consolidated symptoms that were found to be associated with SARS-CoV-2, 12 weeks after infection in our study, were clustered into three phenotypes with varying risk factors. Further research is needed to confirm the identified clusters using prospective and routinely recorded patient-reported symptom data.
Infection with SARS-CoV-2 is independently associated with the reporting of 62 symptoms spanning multiple organ systems 12 weeks or longer after infection. A wide range of both sociodemographic and clinical factors are independently associated with the development of persistent symptoms. Additional research is needed to describe the natural history of long COVID and characterize symptom clusters, their pathophysiology and clinical outcomes.