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Even after months, many corona patients still feel tired and exhausted
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Over two thirds of Long Covid patients who had been treated in hospital for Covid-19 feel little or no improvement even one year after their discharge.
This was the result of a study of over 2,300 adults in the UK.
"Only every third person affected felt completely recovered after a year," said Dr.
Rachel Evans of the National Institute for Health Research gave the Guardian.
Doctors had analyzed the physical performance and general health of those affected five months after they were discharged from the hospital.
After a year, around 1000 study participants were examined again.
Little improvement in cognitive complaints
It was found that the condition of the patients who had persistent symptoms after the hospital stay barely improved in the months that followed.
Between the seventh and twelfth months, there was almost no change in her health.
The risk of long-term consequences of a corona infection is already known - however, the course and frequency as well as the causes of long covid have so far only been poorly investigated.
The British study is the first to provide data on development over a longer period of time.
In the patient group who still suffered from symptoms such as tiredness, pain or shortness of breath even after five months, there was a consistently low improvement rate of less than 30 percent.
There is little or no improvement in cognitive impairment such as the "brain fog".
This affected around a tenth of the test subjects.
After five months there was almost no improvement
"Unfortunately, after a year we saw little improvement over five months," Evans said.
However, the experts were able to identify groups of long-covid sufferers who were affected to different degrees: some patients had an average of only four symptoms and thus a lighter course, while others complained of up to 20 symptoms.
So far, no study has been able to find the causes of the persistent symptoms and the sometimes extremely slow recovery.
The British medical team is therefore urgently calling for new approaches to improve the physical and psychological limitations of Long Covid sufferers.
"We now know that Long Covid does not follow a uniform pattern and therefore needs more than one treatment approach," said study author Evans.
Long Covid is by no means rare: According to a study in September, 37 percent of those who recovered were diagnosed with at least one Long Covid symptom in the first three to six months after the corona infection.
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