#Who has the highest risk of long COVID? It’s complicated (Science News) #spacex #sciencefacts #sciencememes, Science News 2022

#space #science #sciencefiction #spacex #sciencefacts #sciencememes #sciences #spacecraft #sciencenews #animalscience #weirdscience

Who has the highest risk of long COVID? It’s complicated (Science News).
MORE NEWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnd2v0jKABQ&list=PLak9S9ZLSddvamy91U5sTdqsYFFvPzw3o&index=2

OUR INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/americanews.onyoutube/

SPORTS NEWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcndJr0erEo&list=PLak9S9ZLSddvo5xA32wYp9PWAfLReXUbQ&index=1
INTERNATIONAL NEWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJRmPQoBA80&list=PLak9S9ZLSddvamy91U5sTdqsYFFvPzw3o&index=1
SCIENCE NEWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy1m9I4_v0I&list=PLak9S9ZLSdduqRd6p25EISZ9gvJoUq_Lz&index=1
US POLITIC NEWS: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BB1L6kp5U5U/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEbCKgBEF5IVfKriqkDDggBFQAAiEIYAXABwAEG&rs=AOn4CLDJ4SO0yS16_66qU64rGjmAnjYMBA

For millions of people, COVID-19 doesn’t end with a negative test. Weeks or months after traces of the virus disappear from noses and throats, symptoms can persist or come back. New ones might pop up and stick around for months. People suffering from long COVID are unwillingly in it for the long haul — and it’s still unclear who’s at the highest risk for the condition.
Researchers don’t yet have an official definition for long COVID, and its symptoms are wide-ranging. Some people struggle with extreme fatigue that interferes with their daily lives. Others can’t concentrate or struggle with memory amid thick brain fog. Still others have organ damage or a persistent cough and difficulty breathing.
“There are a variety of different kinds of ways that people can have long COVID. It’s not just the one thing,” says Leora Horwitz, an internal medicine physician at New York University Langone Health. “That’s what makes it so hard to study.”
This spectrum of symptoms makes pinning down who’s at high risk for long-term health problems from the disease especially hard. Some post-COVID conditions may stem from virus-induced damage or from the stress of being hospitalized with severe disease. In other cases, the body’s own immune response to the virus could drive the damage. Or the virus may be hiding somewhere in the body, possibly the gut, helping symptoms to persist. Different causes may have different risk groups, says Hannah Davis, cofounder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a research and advocacy group studying long COVID.
There are some broad hints about who’s at risk. Studies suggest that women are more likely than men to have lingering symptoms. COVID-19 patients with more than five symptoms in the first week of infection or preexisting health conditions such as asthma may be more likely to develop long COVID. Age also appears to be a risk factor, though results are mixed regarding whether the burden falls on older people or middle-aged people. Populations that were disproportionally hit by COVID-19 overall — including Black and Hispanic people — may similarly face disparities for long COVID. And while vaccination seems to protect people from developing long COVID, Horwitz says, it’s still unclear by how much.
Age is a risk factor for severe COVID-19, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists more than 30 health problems, including cancer and lung disease, that also raise the risk. “So many researchers assume that those [risk factors] will be the same for long COVID and there’s no scientific basis for that,” Davis says. There are many more that researchers could be missing when it comes to long COVID.
Using health records and exams, and knowledge of ailments with symptoms similar to long COVID, experts are on the hunt for those risk factors.
When it comes to getting a better handle on who’s at risk for long COVID — which also goes by the wonky alias Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection — electronic health records may hold important clues.
Horwitz is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER initiative that aims to understand the long-term impacts of COVID-19. One arm of the study involves mining millions of electronic health records to find potential patterns.
Studying millions of these records should pinpoint potential risk factors that are rare in the population overall but perhaps more common for people with long COVID, Horwitz says. “That’s hard even in a cohort study of thousands.”
But health records aren’t perfect: They depend on physicians logging that patients are having trouble sleeping or focusing, or that they’re exhausted. “The things people are complaining about, we’re really bad at writing down those diagnoses on the record,” Horwitz says. “So we miss that.”
To account for health records’ deficiencies, Horowitz and colleagues are also directly studying thousands of people. Participants answer a questionnaire every three months so that the team can identify what kinds of symptoms people have and whether they’re getting better or worse.

Who has the highest risk of long COVID? It’s complicated

#Who has the highest risk of long COVID? It’s complicated (Science News) #sciencenews #animalscience #weirdscience, Science News 2022

science,breaking science news,science 2021,news,bbc news,scientific discoveries,scientists,new,precipice,biggest scientific discoveries,discoveries,recent scientific breakthroughs,universe,research sci fi,particles,electrons,education,biggest scientific discoveries of 2021,physicists,dark energy,documentary,huw edwards,warp drives,biggest discoveries,list,correspondent,international,united states,space,force,muons,mars molecules,latest discoveries 2021

Leave a Reply