People who are very stressed, anxious, lonely or depressed before contracting the coronavirus are more likely to have prolonged covid than those with good mental health, according to a major study.
A Harvard analysis of health data from nearly 55,000 U.S. volunteers, most of whom were women, found that high levels of psychological distress before Covid infection increased long-term disease risk by between 32% and 1%. 46%.
The results highlight the urgent need to support people with mental health problems and the importance of building broader mental health resilience in the population to reduce the impact of long-lasting covid.
“Depression, stress, and loneliness are very, very common, and the fact that they increase the risk of long-term Covid is remarkable,” said Andrea Roberts, a senior research scientist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Education. . Health. “The associations were stronger with these risk factors than with other things that we know are associated with prolonged COVID, such as obesity, high blood pressure and asthma.”
A sizable minority of people who contract Covid develop long-term, often debilitating, ailments such as fatigue, shortness of breath, mental confusion and heart problems. On one in six middle-aged people and one in 13 young adults in the UK have symptoms that persist for more than three months. There are thought to be multiple causes, ranging from abnormal immune responses to damaged tissue and residual virus lurking in the body.
While the relationship between mental well-being and prolonged Covid is unclear, psychological distress can lead to chronic inflammation and disrupt the immune system, which could make people more vulnerable to prolonged Covid, the researchers note. JAMA Psychiatry.
The Harvard team used questionnaires to classify the mental well-being of 54,960 American volunteers drawn from the Nurses Health Studies and the Studio Growing Up Today. Most of the volunteers were white nurses between the ages of 40 and 70. As of April 2020, none had tested positive for Covid, but over the following year, more than 3,000 contracted the virus and recorded their symptoms.
Those who scored higher on depression, stress, anxiety, loneliness and worry before contracting Covid were more likely to report symptoms lasting more than a month. Such continuous symptoms were 49% more likely in people with two or more forms of psychological distress compared to those who reported none. A similar finding was seen in people whose symptoms lasted at least two months.
All Covid symptoms apart from cough and problems with smell or taste were more common in those who were distressed before contracting the virus. Depending on the type of distress, volunteers were 15% to 51% more likely to say prolonged Covid affected their daily life compared to those who had no mental health issues before testing positive.
The findings do not mean that mental health problems cause prolonged Covid: more than 40% of those who developed prolonged Covid in the study had no signs of distress before infection.
Mental health is known to affect some illnesses. Stress has been linked to increased susceptibility to common colds and another respiratory tract infections. Last year, researchers in london reported that poor mental health before the pandemic increased the risk of prolonged covid, as did being older, female, overweight, in poor general health, and having asthma. A separate study of people with multiple sclerosis found that those with anxiety or depression took more time to recover from Covid.
Siwen Wang, an epidemiologist at Harvard and the study’s first author, said it was important for people with mental health problems to have good access to high-quality care. “Future research should investigate whether better management of psychological distress can prevent people from having Covid for long or improve their symptoms,” she said.
Claire Steves, a professor of aging and health at King’s College London, who was part of a team that found a link between mental health and prolonged Covid last year, said the Harvard study emphasized the need to build support for people vulnerable and improve mental health. resilience in the general population. “It is important to note that this association does not mean that previous mental health problems cause prolonged covid, but rather that mental health problems increase people’s vulnerability, due to the decreased reserve for physiological changes to manifest in daily life”.
Adrian James, President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “People with serious mental illness are at increased risk of developing a range of physical health problems, including prolonged covid. We are still learning about the impact of the virus on people’s physical and mental health, but we do know that prolonged Covid can cause debilitating symptoms. People with prolonged Covid must be able to access the medical care they need, including adequate provision of specialist mental health.
“It is also vital that research into the impacts of prolonged covid on people with pre-existing mental illness continues if we are to ensure the best standard of care for patients in the future.”
The findings come as a new initiative to explore prolonged Covid releases and potential therapies in the US co-founded by patients with researchers from institutions including Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins University, the Long Covid Research Initiative (LCRI) will focus on the theory that the long Covid can be caused by residual virus in the body.
Dr. Amy Proal, a microbiologist at PolyBio Research Foundation and chief scientific officer of LCRI, said the team will look at whether patients still harbor the virus, where it might lurk, and how it might affect the immune system and human gene expression to potentially drive the virus. illness. She will also explore the possible roles of proteins produced by the virus, such as the spike protein, in problems ranging from coagulation to neuroinflammation.
The LCRI has raised more than $15 million from crypto entrepreneur Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi direct donations fund, and the team noted that philanthropic funding reduces the time spent on grant applications. Coupled with a lean organization, they hope the approach will allow their research to move quickly.
The approach, Proal said, is vital given that more people are getting sick with prolonged Covid every day and waiting lists for clinics are growing. “When there’s an emergency like that, you want to involve all sectors, not just the government,” she said.
