Sly Saint
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
A new analysis by researchers at King’s, using data from the COVID Symptom Study app, shows that one in 20 people with COVID-19 are likely to suffer symptoms for 8 weeks or more (so-called ‘long COVID’), potentially adding up to many hundreds of thousands in the UK and millions worldwide.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/study-identifies-those-most-risk-long-covidLed by Dr Claire Steves and Professor Tim Spector at King’s, this study focused on data from 4,182 COVID Symptom Study app users who had been consistently logging their health and tested positive for COVID-19 through swab PCR testing.
The team found that older people, women and those with a greater number of different symptoms in the first week of their illness were more likely to develop long COVID.
The researchers have used this information to develop a model that can predict who is most at risk of long COVID based on their age, gender, and count of early symptoms. Statistical tests showed that this simple prediction was able to detect more than two thirds (69%) of people who went on to get Long-Covid (sensitivity), and 73% effective at avoiding false alarms (specificity).
The team then tested this model against an independent dataset of 2,472 people who reported a positive coronavirus antibody test result with a range of symptoms and found that it gave similar predictions of risk.
The research could be used to help target early interventions and research aimed at preventing and treating this condition.
eta:
"The findings are due to be published as a pre-print on Medrxiv and have not yet been peer-reviewed."