New Delhi, Jan 25 (IANS): Nearly 70 per cent of people continue to experience the same Long Covid symptoms in the second year as in the first year after suffering Covid-19 infection -- caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Researchers from Ulm University, Germany, conducted a population-based case-control study on 982 people between the ages 18 and 65 years, who were diagnosed as having self-assessed long Covid.
These were compared with 576 control patients who did not have the condition. Post-exertional malaise, or exercise intolerance, was seen in 35.6 per cent of participants with long Covid, according to the results, published in the journal PLoS Medicine.
About 11.6 per cent of patients showed symptoms compatible with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. About 67.6 per cent of the 982 participants were considered to have persistent symptoms of long Covid.
Further, most of the 32 per cent of long-Covid patients who reported an improvement initially did not fully recover. People with long Covid also had significantly lower handgrip strength, maximal oxygen consumption, and ventilatory efficiency (how well the body exchanges oxygen).
Notably, breathlessness was reported as a moderate-to-severe symptom in almost half of the long-Covid patients.
"In the majority of patients, Long Covid symptoms did not improve in the second year of their illness and typically continued to include fatigue and measurable exercise intolerance and cognition deficits, but there seems to be no major pathology in laboratory investigations," said the team led by Raphael S. Peter in the paper.
Patients with persistent Long Covid symptoms also tend to be more often obese, with higher mean values for body mass index and body fat, and had lower educational status.
Meanwhile, a separate study, based on a cohort of Italian children, showed that artificial intelligence may be able to detect a "long Covid molecular signature" in the blood of patients.
Currently, there are no proper diagnoses available for long Covid symptoms. The study, published in the journal Pediatric Research, showed that the AI model, based on protein profiling was able to identify long Covid with an accuracy of 0.93.