For some people, covid can cause symptoms that last weeks or months after the infection has gone. This is sometimes called long covid.
1 in 8 adults are likely to develop long covid symptoms after being infected with coronavirus, a new study from the Netherlands reported.
Researchers collected the data by asking participants to fill out monthly digital questionnaires on 23 long covid symptoms commonly associated with covid in an uninfected population and in people who had had a covid diagnosis.
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The questionnaire was sent out 24 times to the same people from March 2020 to August 2021. During this period people would have been infected with alpha or an earlier variant, with most people being unvaccinated.
The study found several common symptoms in people became worse or were newly developed three months after they had Covid.
Aranka Ballering, study author and a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, said: “Post-Covid-19 condition is an urgent problem with a mounting human toll. Understanding the core symptoms and the prevalence of post-Covid-19 in the general population represents a major step forward for our ability to design studies that can ultimately inform successful healthcare responses to the long term symptoms of Covid-19.”
The authors noted they will have only covered people infected with the Alpha variant or earlier variants and had no data on patients infected by Delta or Omicron. They added that due to asymptomatic infection, where people don’t experience symptoms, the prevalence of covid in the study may have been underestimated.
The most common symptoms according to the study and NHS data are:
Extreme fatigue
Shortness of Breath
Chest pain or tightness
Heart palpitations
Loss of taste and smell
Tingling extremities
A lump in the throat
Heavy arms and legs
Feeling hot and cold
Dizziness
Joint pain
Earaches, including tinnitus
Depression and anxiety
A persistent cough
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