Exercise ‘intolerance’ should be considered an official symptom of prolonged Covid, scientists say.
A review of existing studies found that the condition, which is not yet fully understood, can rob people of the equivalent of a decade of physical fitness.
The finding adds to a long list of symptoms associated with prolonged covid, the name for signs of illness that persist for months after a Coronavirus infection.
Previous studies have found that headaches, fatigue, and brain fog are the most common ailments, but anecdotally, people say they also have a hard time exercising.
Determining whether covid-19 is the real culprit behind these problems has proven difficult, given how common these symptoms are.
Professor Matthew Durstenfeld, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the new review, said “something was definitely going on.”
His team looked at resilience in people with prolonged Covid and compared them to people of similar ages who recovered from the virus.
They found that long-term Covid patients performed worse and had the resilience of someone a decade younger.
Exercise ‘intolerance’ should be considered an official symptom of prolonged Covid, scientists say (file)
CDC data shows the percentage of people reporting symptoms after a positive Covid test. The green, purple, turquoise and orange bars show people who would be classified as having prolonged Covid, as symptoms persist after 12 weeks. The most frequently reported long-lasting symptoms are headaches, runny nose, loss of smell, taste, or hair, and sore throat.
The estimated number of people in the UK with self-reported prolonged Covid has grown over the months, reaching a peak during April 2022 of 1,988
Forty-year-olds with prolonged Covid ran or cycled like ‘someone in their fifties’, Professor Durstenfeld said washington post.
An estimated 16 million Americans and 2 million Britons have the condition, but doctors are still divided on the true number.
The new analysis focused on 464 people with prolonged Covid and 359 without it, aged between 39 and 56, involved in nine existing trials.
All participants tested their exercise capacity and heart rate on a treadmill or stationary bike.
In general, those who had recovered from Covid could handle a normal amount of exercise for their age.
Their heart rates could not reach the expected average rate during exercise, slowing blood flow throughout the body.
During moderate exercise, your average heart rate should be between 90 and 126 beats per minute, and for vigorous exercise, it should be between 126 and 153.
And your muscles took in less oxygen from your bloodstream than they normally would, making it harder for your muscles to contract. Some people also hyperventilated.
Professor Durstenfeld said that these are not normal reactions after someone loses form after being ill.
Writing in the study, published in Open JAMA Networkthe researchers described the symptom as “exertion intolerance.”
Dr. David Systrom, a lung expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the study, mused that people with prolonged Covid may experience molecular changes in their muscles, nerves and blood vessels.
This means that their bodies may become less tolerant to the physical demands of exercise, even if they don’t have anything abnormal with their lungs or hearts.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that about eight percent of American adults suffer from a prolonged form of covid.
It is almost impossible to know how likely a person is to develop it after covid infection due to the huge under-reporting of cases that has occurred since the Omicron variant emerged last year.
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