Patients continue to have symptoms six months after discharge from hospital

The study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, includes data on 1,655 covid-19 patients who were discharged from Jin Yin-tan Hospital in Wuhan, China, where the infection was first detected in December 2019, before becoming a pandemic.

The patients, who were an average of 57 years old, were followed up after hospital discharge, which lasted an average of six months.

For the purposes of the study, they answered a questionnaire to assess symptoms and quality of life, underwent examinations, laboratory tests and a six-minute walking exercise.

In addition, new tests were conducted on 94 patients whose blood antibody levels had been recorded at the peak of infection for a previous study.

According to the study published today, 76.4% of patients reported having at least one common symptom of covid-19 after six months of hospital discharge, with fatigue or muscle weakness (62.7%) being the most common. mentioned, followed by difficulty sleeping (26.4%).

The authors emphasize that, when analyzing the data, it was not possible to determine whether the symptoms reported by the respondents were persistent after infection, worsened after recovery, or occurred after discharge from hospital.

The study, which aimed to measure the long-term effects of covid-19, a respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus, found that levels of neutralizing antibodies fell 52.5% after six months in the 94 patients whose response immune had been tested. at the peak of the infection, “raising concerns about the possibility of being reinfected” by SARS-CoV-2.

Since the number of participants with antibody test results is limited, a larger sample will need to be considered to clarify how COVID-19 coronavirus neutralizing antibody levels change over time, the article authors caution: quoted in a statement from The Lancet.

Laboratory tests also revealed that the kidney function of 107 patients (out of the 822 examined in this field) worsened after discharge from hospital (the kidneys are one of the organs affected by COVID-19).

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