More than three-quarters of people hospitalized with COVID-19 still suffered from at least one symptom after six months, according to a new study.
The research, which was published on Saturday in the medical journal Lancet, involved hundreds of patients in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the new coronavirus was first detected.
He found fatigue or muscle weakness to be the most common symptoms, although people also reported having trouble sleeping.
The scientists said the study – among the few to track the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 – shows the need for further investigation into the persistent effects of coronavirus.
“Because COVID-19 is such a new disease, we are just beginning to understand some of its long-term effects on patients’ health,” said lead author Bin Cao of the National Center for Respiratory Medicine.
The professor said the research highlighted the need to continue patient care after hospital discharge, especially those who had severe infections.
The new study included 1,733 patients with COVID-19 who were discharged from Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan between January and May last year.
The patients, with an average age of 57 years, were visited between June and September and answered questions about symptoms and health-related quality of life.
The researchers also performed physical examinations and laboratory tests.
The study found that 76 percent of patients who participated in the follow-up (1,265 out of 1,655) said they still had symptoms.
Muscle fatigue or weakness was reported by 63 percent, while 26 percent had sleep problems.
The study also looked at 94 patients whose blood antibody levels were recorded at the height of the infection, as part of another trial.
When these patients were tested again after six months, their neutralizing antibody levels were 52.5 percent lower.
The authors said this raises concerns about the possibility of reinfection of COVID-19, although they said that larger samples would be needed to clarify how immunity to the virus changes over time.
The World Health Organization has said that the virus poses a risk of serious and continuous effects for some people – even among young people, healthy people who have not been hospitalized. To date, there have been more than 89 million confirmed cases of coronavirus, including about 1.9 million related deaths and 49.5 million recovered.
“Patients should be examined for a period of six months or more due to the complications of contracting the virus. This means that we will have even less capacity and less health workforce available to treat these individuals, ”said Oksana Pyzik, global health consultant and UCL lecturer, to Al Jazeera.
“This will have indirect consequences for the treatment of all types of chronic conditions,” like cancer, said Pyzik.
In a commentary article, which was also published in the Lancet, Monica Cortinovis, Norberto Perico and Giuseppe Remuzzi, of the Istituto di Ricerche Pharmacologiche Mario Negri IRCCS in Italy, said there was uncertainty about the long-term health consequences of the pandemic.
“Unfortunately, there are few reports on the clinical picture of the consequences of COVID-19,” they said, adding that the most recent study was therefore “relevant and timely”.
They said that long-term multidisciplinary research conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom would help improve understanding and develop therapies to “mitigate the long-term consequences of COVID-19 in various organs and tissues”.