A large-scale study published Wednesday in the journal “Nature” reveals that a large proportion of adolescent victims of long Covid recover completely after two years.
Note that older and/or more disadvantaged individuals are more likely to contract such symptoms.
Encouraging results. A study was published Wednesday, December 4 in the journal Nature on the long-term consequences of prolonged symptoms of Covid-19 on adolescents. More precisely, researchers from University College London solicited 12,632 patients, aged 11 to 17, with a positive PCR test between September 2020 and March 2021*. Among them, 233 (or 1.85%) were judged to have long Covid, three months after being affected by the virus. After six months, almost half of these individuals were considered cured (135, or 52.79% of people with persistent symptoms of the coronavirus). This number drops to 94 (40.34%) after one year and 68 (29.18%) after two years.
In other words, 24 months after their contamination, 70% of patients returned to their initial state of health. But that means 30% haven't recovered. Affected children reported an average of five to six symptoms – including fatigue, trouble sleeping, shortness of breath and headaches – at each milestone.
“Our results show that for adolescents who met our definition of long Covid three months after testing positive for the Covid virus, the majority recovered after two years. This is good news, but we intend to do further research to try to better understand why 68 teenagers did not recovers”, details the first author of the study, Professor Sir Terence Stephenson, of the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, in the columns of Guardian .
Are the oldest and most disadvantaged more vulnerable?
At the same time, scientists observed that older and more disadvantaged adolescents were more likely to suffer from these stigmas. Likewise, girls seem more vulnerable to long Covid than boys. “This study shows once again that health problems like long Covid tend to affect the most disadvantaged in society, young and old”analyzes for our British colleagues Dr Nathan Cheetham, from King's College London. “These findings reinforce the need to address the underlying causes of health problems, such as poor housing conditions, financial stress and unequal access to health services, if we are to focus on disease prevention before inequalities such as those found in this study occur“, he calls again.
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Note that the researchers relied on the “Long COVID in Children and Young People (CloCk)” study to describe the symptoms and their impact on the lives of children and young people 24 months after infection. Concretely, children and adolescents were considered to be suffering from long Covid if they presented more than one symptom, for at least three months, of fatigue, sleep problems, shortness of breath or headaches, as well as problems with mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain or discomfort, or feeling worried or sad.
*Individuals testing positive tested positive before the Delta and Omicron variants of the virus became dominant, so the results may not reflect the long-term effects of these variants, the authors caution.
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