Summary: Long COVID (LC) shows up in many ways. Yet one of the latest studies shows that pain is still the most common complaint in people who have it. Pain is the main complaint of one-third of people living with LC. Symptoms like pain are also worse in older adults, women, and non-white people.
Long COVID (LC) is a complex problem that science still does not fully understand. Some people make a full recovery from COVID but keep feeling sick for a long time, often for months. Science still cannot say why.
Even diagnosing it is hard, because it looks different in most patients. Some patients complain of constant body aches. Others report fatigue, brain fog, chest pain, or shortness of breath. In fact, science has found more than 100 symptoms of the condition. Chronic pain specialists are finding that pain is still one of the main problems in caring for these patients.
LC does not appear to be rare. Studies report that 10-30% of patients who were not hospitalized develop LC. For hospitalized patients, the figure is 70%. Worse, even about 10% of vaccinated people may develop it.
People often have some lingering problems after viral infections like colds and flu. But LC is different. It keeps affecting people for months after a full recovery. And in some people, these symptoms may grow and keep getting worse.
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Even after so many years, we are still learning about LC. That is mainly because it looks so different from person to person. Still, it is now known as a common problem in people who have recovered from the infection. But it remains hard to diagnose, because its signs are so vague. Patients with LC often complain of pain and fatigue. Yet these symptoms show up in many other health problems too. Now, a new study published in JRSM Open says that pain is the primary symptom of the condition.
This new study was a retrospective study. That means researchers looked back at the records of patients who had recovered from COVID but had LC complaints. They studied 1008 people with a doctor-confirmed diagnosis of LC. They found a lot.
They looked at 109 symptoms. Pain was the single most common complaint, present in 26.5% of patients. Other common complaints were neurophysiological issues (18.4%), fatigue (14.3%), and trouble breathing (7.4%). They also saw that symptoms grew stronger each month after a full recovery from COVID.
As expected, LC was much more common in older patients than in young people. LC was also more likely in non-white patients. That may point to unequal health care in the UK. And women were more likely than men to have intense symptoms.
So this study shows that pain is very common in LC. It is more likely in women, older patients, and non-white people. Care for this group must take these factors into account. Interventional pain management can use this information to build plans aimed at the chronic pain of LC. That makes care more targeted for the people affected.
This study did have limits. It did not look at why some groups had more pain. It did not look at why pain was so common in LC, or how it works. Still, these findings show the role of pain management in people who have recovered from COVID.
Of course, LC is complex. Patients have many health complaints, so each patient is unique. That means LC care must be tailored to each patient. Since the condition lasts so long, lifestyle changes also play a key role, along with medications.
Source:
Sunkersing, D., Goodfellow, H., Mu, Y., Ramasawmy, M., Murali, M., Adams, L., FitzGerald, T. J., Blandford, A., Stevenson, F., Bindman, J., Robson, C., & Banerjee, A. (2024). Long COVID symptoms and demographic associations: A retrospective case series study using healthcare application data. JRSM Open, 15(7), 20542704241274292. https://doi.org/10.1177/20542704241274292
Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP
