Certain infections are more difficult to recover than others. Consider COVID-19 infection. A new study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases found that people who have COVID or COVID-like syndromes typically recover mentally from their infection after nine months, but only physically within three months. This suggests that the mental recovery process is particularly long and requires further study and medical attention. According to a University of California Los Angeles press release, Lauren Wisk is a co-author of the study and assistant professor. She said, “We’ve recently recognized that recovery differs between mental and physical health after COVID infections.” The findings [show] show that health professionals should pay greater attention to the mental well-being of their patients after COVID-19 infections and offer more resources to improve both their mental and physical health.
Long-Lasting COVID Effects
Infections with COVID-19 are associated a variety of symptoms including fever, fatigue and coughing. In the months following a COVID-19, patients are still not at their healthiest, both mentally and physically. All sorts of research has shown that COVID patients continue to experience reduced health for many months, sometimes due to a post-COVID chronic condition known as long COVID, with detrimental effects on their HRQoL. The authors of the study
analyzed recovery times for people who had COVID and COVID like infections to determine how long it took to recover from COVID-19-related symptoms. The team studied around 1,100 patients with COVID and 300 who were COVID negative. They surveyed them about physical function, pain and fatigue, anxiety and depression, social engagement, sleep problems, cognitive function and their overall health for 12 months after their illness. The study’s authors discovered that after a year-long survey, participants were categorized into four categories of health: poor mental HRQoL or physical HRQoL. Although most participants recovered their mental and physical health more quickly than their physical health, about 20 percent continued to have poor HRQoL 12 months following their infection. The study’s authors reported that the transition from poor to ideal HRQoL took place within 3 months. However, it took 9 months to move from poor to optimal mental HRQoL. “Nonetheless, about 1/5 of respondents were still in the poor HRQoL category with high self-reported COVID symptoms up to 12 month after infection.”
Read More: What is Long COVID, and What Are the Symptoms?
COVID and COVID-Like Consequences
Intriguingly, the COVID-positive participants recovered from their infections slightly faster than the COVID-negative patients, as more COVID-positive patients reached optimal HRQoL after a year than the COVID-negative ones. According to the study authors, this may mean that COVID and COVID-like infections have similar sequelae, or aftereffects, with the consequences of both being important subjects for future research.
“[COVID positive] participants were more likely to return to the optimal HRQoL class compared to [COVID negative] participants,” the study authors wrote. “Prior medical research may have previously underestimated the prevalence of serious negative sequelae after acute illness, explaining why [COVID positive] and [COVID negative] participants appear more similar.”
Taken together, the findings show that the long-term effects of COVID and COVID-like infections are especially long, particularly when it comes to patients’ mental health.
“Future research should focus on how to improve the treatment models of care for patients who continue to experience COVID-19 symptoms,” Wisk added in the release. “Especially as 1 in 5 patients may continue to suffer over a year after their initial infection.”
This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.
Read More: What Can the Pandemic Teach Us About Mental Health?
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Open Forum Infectious Diseases
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is the source for this article. Association of SARS CoV-2 with Health-Related Life Quality 1 Year after Illness using Latent Transition Analysis.
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JAMA Network Open. Sam Walters, a Discover journalist, covers archaeology and paleontology for Discover. He also writes about ecology, evolution, and other subjects. Sam Walters studied journalism at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, before joining Discover as assistant editor in the year 2022.
