Long covid can impair people as much as advanced cancers, research finds
“As well as patients reporting severe fatigue, they also report breathlessness, anxiety, depression and cognitive dysfunction,” the study found. File picture: iStock
Long covid can impair people as seriously as Parkinson’s disease, strokes or advanced cancers, research from UK universities and hospitals has found.
The study identified “striking levels of functional impairment” driven by fatique among long covid patients referred for specialist rehabilitation. “Functional impairment was worse than in patients who had a stroke,” the study states.
It adds the impairment was “comparable to patients with Parkinson’s disease“. Patients also reported low health-related quality of life, getting scores “which compare poorly with patients with advanced/metastatic cancers”.
Researchers, led by University College London (UCL) and the University of Exeter, said the scores showed worse fatigue among long covid patients than patients with stroke, inflammatory bowel disease, end-stage renal disease and anaemic cancer patients.
“As well as patients reporting severe fatigue, they also report breathlessness, anxiety, depression and cognitive dysfunction,” the study found. The impact of this fatigue was partly identified through a question around lost working days.
Some one in five (20.3%) said they had lost between 20 and 28 working days in the previous month. Some 50.8% said they had lost one or more working days during the previous month, the study, published on the BMJ Open, found.
Co-author and National Institute for Health and Care Research Clinical Lecturer in eHealth at UCL, Dr Henry Goodfellow, said: “My colleagues and I found that long covid can cause fatigue and affect a person’s daily functioning more so than some cancers.”
Writing on research network The Conversation, he said fatigue has the biggest effect on people’s lives.
“We found that many of the long covid patients were seriously unwell, and often their symptoms were keeping them from doing day-to-day activities such as simple household chores or caring for other people,” he said.
He added: “The long covid patients on average reported health-related quality of life scores which were lower than people with advanced metastatic cancers, such as stage 4 lung cancer.”
Looking to the future, the research team called for further targeted research into treatment for long covid. “Currently, clinical services lack evidence-based approaches in treating patients experiencing fatigue related to PCS (post covid syndrome) with no standard rehabilitation pathway,” they stated.
The research involved 3,754 adults from 31 specialised post-covid-19 clinics in England and Wales. Researchers used the WSAS (Work and Social Adjustment Scale) as the main measurement tool, along with the EQ-5D family of questionnaires to measure health-related quality of life.
It is not yet known how many people in Ireland have or had long covid since the pandemic started.
A HSE FADA study which opened late last year is yet to report, with the HSE currently estimating between 10% and 20% of people infected with covid-19 develop long-term symptoms.
The UK study “Impact of fatigue as the primary determinant of functional limitations among patients with post-COVID-19 syndrome: a cross-sectional observational study” can be read on BMJ Open.
