Three quarters of patients still ill with Covid

‘Urgent need’ highlighted for NHS to support the rapidly increasing patient group, new study reveals

‘No specific therapeutics exist for long Covid and our data highlight that effective interventions are urgently required’

‘Our findings suggest that these groups might respond to anti-inflammatory strategies’

JUST one in four patients who were hospitalised with Covid are fully recovered a year later, a major study suggests.

The research involving more than 2,000 patients in the UK shows that women, those who are obese and those who ended up on a ventilator were most likely to struggle with long Covid.

Scientists said there was an “urgent need” for the NHS to support a rapidly increasing patient group, who currently have no specific treatments available.

The new study suggests that poor recovery from Covid is associated with inflammation of key proteins, which experts said should be targeted in the hunt for an effective cure. More than 830,000 patients have been hospitalised with Covid in the UK since the start of the pandemic, official figures show.

The new study, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine and presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, tracked patients treated at 39 NHS hospitals in the UK.

In total, 2,320 participants discharged from hospital between March 7, 2020, and April 18, 2021, were assessed five months after discharge. Of those, 807 participants were still being tracked at 12 months. Overall, just 29 per cent were fully recovered – with women 32 per cent less likely to have made a full recovery, while those who were obese were half as likely to have reached this point.

And those whose hospital stay involved mechanical ventilation were 58 per cent less likely to have fully recovered, the research found.

Researchers found similar trends at five months, when just 26 per cent were fully recovered, suggesting that progress in the first few months after hospitalisation is key. In almost half of cases, symptom severity at five months was classed as severe or very severe.

The most common ongoing long Covid symptoms were fatigue, muscle pain, physically slowing down, poor sleep, and breathlessness. Those tracked for 12 months had a mean age of 59, with one in three female, and more than a quarter having been on ventilators.

Recovery was assessed using patientreported outcome measures, physical performance, and organ function at five months and one year after hospital discharge. Researchers also took samples of participants’ blood at the five-month visit to analyse it for the presence of various inflammatory proteins.

Increased levels of the inflammatory biomarker C-reactive protein were associated with the more severe forms of long Covid, and levels of the inflammatory biomarker interleukin-6 (IL-6) were also found to be raised.

Those who were obese and had reduced exercise capacity, were also more likely to suffer badly. Data from the Office for National Statistics suggests that around 1.7million people are currently experiencing long Covid, which is defined as symptoms which persist for more than four weeks after suspected Covid infection.

The new study was led by Prof Christopher Brightling, Dr Rachael Evans, and Prof Louise Wain, from the National Institute for Health Research Leicester Biomedical Research Centre at the University of Leicester.

Prof Wain said: “No specific therapeutics exist for long Covid and our data highlight that effective interventions are urgently required. Our findings of persistent systemic inflammation … suggest that these groups might respond to anti-inflammatory strategies.”