(Today) Despite the plethora of symptoms reported by patients with long COVID, a new study points to just seven that are unique to the illness. However, some long COVID researchers and doctors who’ve treated the disease believe this list is far from comprehensive.
The goal of the study was to look for long COVID symptoms that appear or persist more than a month after the initial infection and are distinct from symptoms of other common respiratory viruses, such as the flu or common cold. To do so, researchers used Cerner Real-World Data, a database containing information extracted from the electronic medical records from 122 health systems in the U.S.
They analyzed data from electronic health records of more than 17,000 patients diagnosed with COVID before April 14, 2022; more than 17,000 patients diagnosed with a different respiratory virus between March 1, 2020, and April 1, 2021; and 15,694 people with no virus diagnosis but who sought health care between 2020 and 2022.