Less than 10% of the people treated for persistent covid at the Can Ruti hospital in Badalona have been cured two years later, according to one of the largest investigations that have been carried out in the world on the long-term evolution of the syndrome.
The Can Ruti team warns that persistent covid is a public health problem that is still little appreciated and that affects a large volume of the population, so it should be managed from primary care in collaboration with specialized hospital services.
The Badalona hospital has so far treated two thousand patients in what is the largest persistent covid unit in Spain. "We have analyzed data from the first 341 patients in whom we have a two-year follow-up," reports Lourdes Mateu, first author of the study.
According to the results published today in The Lancet Regional Health - Europe magazine, only 7.6% of these patients have been without symptoms for at least three months and are considered cured. Almost all of them are people who had few symptoms, with fatigue as the main affectation, and who suffered persistent covid for a median of eleven months.
Conversely, those who have persistent covid with multiple symptoms are less likely to make a full recovery, especially if they suffer from cognitive (such as difficulty concentrating), respiratory (difficulty breathing), cardiac (tachycardia) or muscle pain disorders.
The data from Can Ruti indicate that persistent covid affects women more than men, especially people between the ages of 35 and 60, and that the risk of suffering from it increases if they have certain health problems such as fibromyalgia, headaches, obesity or autoimmune diseases.
“It is some of the most rigorous research on recovery from persistent covid that I have seen,” Hannah Davis, from the New York Patient-Led Research Consortium and first author of a review article on persistent covid, has valued on the X social network. published this year in Nature Reviews Microbiology.
The results are in line with those of an American study presented on August 21 in Nature Medicine, which revealed that the symptoms of persistent covid tend to subside over time but remain a major cause of disability two years after the initial infection.
The most common symptoms recorded in the Can Ruti study are fatigue (which affects more than 70% of people with persistent covid), respiratory distress (55%), headache (45%), muscle and/or joint pain ( more than 40%) and neurocognitive disorders such as difficulty concentrating or memory loss (40%).
Sensory (such as smell and taste disorders), cardiovascular (such as tachycardia), gastrointestinal (diarrhea or abdominal pain, among others) or skin (hair loss, rashes) symptoms are also frequently recorded.
Both the study by Can Ruti and the one in the United States are based on people who contracted covid in the first waves of the pandemic, since they are the only group in which it has been possible to follow up for two years.
In people who currently contract covid, and who already have immunity thanks to vaccines and/or previous infections, "the risk of developing persistent covid is lower but not zero," warns Roger Paredes, co-director of the research.
"In our unit we care for patients who were well until now and who have recently developed persistent covid despite being vaccinated and being infected with the omicron variant," adds Lourdes Mateu. “We have also observed that if a person has persistent covid and is re-infected, it usually gets worse; We recommend that you get vaccinated to avoid reinfection.”
The research, which has had the participation of the IrsiCaixa institute, has been financed by the Fundació Lluita contra les Infeccións.
The data from Can Ruti, Mateu acknowledges, are not representative of the general population since "serious cases arrive at the hospital and it is possible that, among the milder cases, the percentage of people who fully recover is higher."
Even so, "as long as SARS-CoV-2 infections continue, more cases of people with persistent covid will accumulate," the Can Ruti doctors conclude in the scientific article. "European health systems must be prepared to absorb and manage this demand."
