COVID-19 causes long-term physical, mental health problems in people of all ages: Study

According to Martin Roessler of Technische Universitat Dresden, Germany, and colleagues’ new study published in the journal PLOS Medicine, there is a significant new-onset major complication in children, adolescents, and adults across 13 distinct diagnosis and symptom complexes following COVID-19 infection.

According to research, some patients infected with COVID-19 experience long-term health difficulties after the acute phase of the disease. However, research on post-acute (post-COVID-19) syndrome remains limited, particularly in children and adolescents. Researchers identified patients with a polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 in the new study, which used a healthcare dataset covering nearly half of the German population and spanned all of 2019 and 2020.

They then compared the occurrence of pre-specified diagnoses, entered into the medical record at least three months post-infection, in these patients (11,950 children and adolescent and 145,184 adults) to a control cohort of more than 750,000 individuals with matched age, sex and pre-existing medical conditions, without PCR-confirmed COVID-19.

Overall, children and adolescents who had been infected with COVID-19 were 30% more likely than controls to have documented health problems beginning three months or more after infection (436.91 vs 335.98 per 1,000 person-years, IRR=1.30, 95% CI=1.25-1.35, p<0.01). Adults with COVID-19 were 33% more likely than controls to have health problems (615.82 vs 464.15 per 1,000 person-years, IRR=1.33, 95% CI=1.31-1.34, p<0.01).

Among children and adolescents, rates of malaise/fatigue/exhaustion, cough and throat/chest pain were the most strongly associated with a prior COVID-19 infection, but rates of headache, fever, abdominal pain, anxiety disorder and depression were also increased. Among adults, smell/taste disturbance, fever, and dyspnea (or difficulty breathing) were most strongly associated with COVID-19 infection but also more common were cough, throat and chest pain, hair loss, fatigue, exhaustion and headache.

“The results of the present study indicate that post-COVID-19 syndrome cannot be dismissed among children and adolescents,” the authors say.

“We found that COVID-19 diagnosis was associated with higher long-term demand for healthcare services as reflected in outpatient and inpatient diagnoses of a broad set of outcomes more than three months after confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. While children and adolescents appear to be less affected than adults, these findings are statistically significant for all age groups.”