A third of people hospitalised with Covid-19 have “abnormalities” in various organs months after being infected, a British study said on Saturday, potentially shedding light on the elusive state of long Covid.
Millions of people around the world are estimated to suffer from long Covid, in which a diversity of symptoms such as shortness of breath, fatigue and brain fog persist long after patients first contract the virus.
Still, much of the disease is still unknown, and how exactly it explains how Covid causes such a wide variety of symptoms.
The authors of the new study, published in the journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, said it marked a “step forward” in helping others with long-standing Covid.
The study is the first to analyze magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of organs (brain, heart, liver, kidneys and lungs) after being hospitalized with Covid.
It compares organ scans of 259 adults hospitalised with Covid across the UK in 2020-2021 with an organisation of 52 other people who never contracted the virus.
According to the study, almost a third of Covid patients had abnormalities in more than one organ on average months after being discharged from hospital.
According to the report, people hospitalized with Covid were 14 times more likely to have lung abnormalities and 3 times more likely to have brain abnormalities.
However, hearts and livers appear to be more resistant, the researchers added.
Brain abnormalities included a higher rate of white brain lesions, which were linked to mild cognitive impairment.
Among the adjustments seen in the lungs were scarring and symptoms of inflammation.
‘Concrete evidence’
People with multiple organ abnormalities were four times more likely to have severe intellectual and physical impairments, making them “unable to perform their daily activities,” Principal Betty Raman of the University of Oxford said at an online news conference.
And because the Covid organization was a little older and sometimes less healthy than the control organization, the researchers tried to adjust their effects to account for those differences.
It also covers the milder variants of Omicron that remain dominant around the world.
But there are other people around the world who are still hospitalized with the virus, the researchers said.
Study co-author Christopher Brightling, from the University of Leicester, said the study provides “concrete evidence that there are changes in various organs” after other people are hospitalized with Covid.
Rather than being alarming, he said the localization is a “step forward in terms of our actual capacity for other people with long Covid. “
Matthew Baldwin, a lung disease specialist at Columbia University who was not involved in the study, said that “these findings suggest that the long duration of Covid is not explained by severe deficits concentrated in a single organ. “
“Conversely, the interaction of two or more organ abnormalities may simply have an additive or multiplicative effect by creating physiological deficits that lead to prolonged Covid symptoms,” he wrote in an observational article in The Lancet.
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