COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized within the first 30 days after infection face a 29% higher risk of death in the third year
Many studies have shown that long term effects of SARS-CoV2 infection can persist for years but new research has shown that the risk of death from these symptoms reduces after the three year mark.
US researchers have reported in Nature Medicine that COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized within the first 30 days after infection face a 29% higher risk of death in the third year compared with people who have not had the virus. However, the increased risk of death diminishes significantly one year after a SARS-CoV-2 infection among people who were not hospitalized for the virus.
“We aren’t sure why the virus’s effects linger for so long,” said senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a Washington University clinical epidemiologist and a global leader in long COVID research. “Possibly it has to do with viral persistence, chronic inflammation, immune dysfunction or all the above. We tend to think of infections as mostly short-term illnesses with health effects that manifest around the time of infection. Our data challenges this notion. I feel COVID-19 continues to teach us — and this is an important new lesson — that a brief, seemingly innocuous or benign encounter with the virus can still lead to health problems years later.”
Al-Aly’s prior research has documented COVID-19’s damage to nearly every human organ, contributing to diseases and conditions affecting the lungs, heart, brain, and the body’s blood, musculoskeletal and gastrointestinal (GI) systems.
Such studies with longer follow-up are limited, said Al-Aly, a nephrologist who treats patients at the Washington University-affiliated John J. Cochran Veterans Hospital in midtown St. Louis. “Addressing this knowledge gap is critical to enhance our understanding of long COVID and will help inform care for people suffering from long COVID.”
