Current best evidence for clinical care (more info)
Whilst the entire world is battling the second wave of COVID-19, a substantial proportion of patients who have suffered from the condition in the past months are reporting symptoms that last for months after recovery, i. e., long-term COVID-19 symptoms. We aimed to assess the current evidence on the long-term symptoms in COVID-19 patients. We did a systematic review on PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE, and Google Scholar from database inception to February 15, 2021, for studies on long-term COVID-19 symptoms. We included all type of papers that reported at least one long-term COVID-19 symptom. We screened studies using a standardized data collection form and pooled data from published studies. Cohort cross-sectional, case-report, cases-series, case-control studies, and review were graded using specific quality assessment tools. Of 11,361 publications found following our initial search we assessed 218 full-text articles, of which 145 met all selection criteria. We found that 20.70% of reports on long-term COVID-19 symptoms were on abnormal lung functions, 24.13% on neurologic complaints and olfactory dysfunctions, and 55.17% on specific widespread symptoms, mainly chronic fatigue, and pain. Despite the relatively high heterogeneity of the reviewed studies, our findings highlighted that a noteworthy proportion of patients who have suffered from SARS-CoV-2 infection present a "post-COVID syndrome." The multifaceted understanding of all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including these long-term symptoms, will allow us to respond to all the global health challenges, thus paving the way to a stronger public health.
| Discipline / Specialty Area | Score |
|---|---|
| Infectious Disease | |
| Family Medicine (FM)/General Practice (GP) | |
| General Internal Medicine-Primary Care(US) | |
| Hospital Doctor/Hospitalists | |
| Internal Medicine | |
| Pediatrics (General) | |
| Pediatric Hospital Medicine | |
Excellent! Comprehensive and extremely useful.
This is a nice systematic review of the data to date on long COVID. As a hospitalist, I find this affects me less than others, but it was a helpful and interesting compilation.
This meta-analysis of "post-covid" syndrome shows a varying symptom complex affecting any system. We continue to learn and its far from over.
I am not sure if this article is relevant to the pediatrician discipline.
This is an excellent overview but difficult to score as 1) the relevance for developed countries is less now that immunisation is wide-spread and 2) most clinicians are aware of a significant issue with "long-Covid" but are probably not aware of these percentage incidences.