In an effort to better understand why some people continue to suffer after being infected with COVID-19, researchers from University of Utah Health have helped to identify 12 of the most common lingering symptoms.

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is coordinated through the National Institutes of Health’s Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery initiative. The nationwide effort is committed to understand why some people with COVID go on to develop long-term symptoms. Most importantly, researchers said they hope the findings will help detect, treat and prevent long COVID.

“This study is really important because it starts to help us to define what long COVID is,” said Dr. Rachel Hess, associate vice president for research at U of U Health and co-director of the Utah Clinical and Translational Science Institute. “And while defining something is great, the goal is to find treatments and interventions that will help improve the symptoms in our patients. I’m really hopeful because we have so many people affected.”

Hess, who leads the Mountain States PASC Consortium in the ongoing study, said there is no official documentation on exactly how many Utahns have long COVID because the data is about a year and a half behind. However, to date, the federal government’s Household Pulse Survey estimates about 6% of those infected with the virus continue to experience and suffer from long COVID symptoms. To date, more than 100 million Americans have been infected with the virus.

Researchers looked at data from 9,764 adults, including 8,646 infected with COVID-19 and 1,118 not infected with the virus.

“There have been more than 200 symptoms documented with long COVID, but our study has shown there are 12 symptoms that are consistent and especially characteristic across the board,” Hess said.

Those 12 symptoms include post-exertional malaise, fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, gastrointestinal symptoms, heart palpitations, issues with sexual desire or capacity, loss of smell or taste, thirst, chronic cough, chest pain and abnormal movements. The research also found that long COVID was more common and severe in those study participants who were either unvaccinated or reinfected.

“This is one of the first papers to come out. There are other studies that we hope will help us ultimately define long COVID,” Hess said.

The studies will include looking at electronic health data to see if there are similar patterns, looking at autopsy reports to determine which organs are attacked by the virus, pediatric evaluations, and a study to evaluate whether being infected with COVID during pregnancy affected infants at birth. The pregnancy study is led by Dr. Torri Metz, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at U of U Health.

Newsletter