https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-damage-covid-19-s-lingering-problems-alarm-s...
Researchers are now facing a familiar COVID-19 narrative: trying to make sense of a mystifying illness. Distinct features of the virus, including its propensity to cause widespread inflammation and blood clotting, could play a role in the assortment of concerns now surfacing. “We’re seeing a really complex group of ongoing symptoms,” says Rachael Evans, a pulmonologist at the University of Leicester.
Survivor studies are starting to probe them. This month, researchers across the United Kingdom including Evans launched a study that will follow 10,000 survivors for 1 year to start, and up to 25 years. Ultimately, researchers hope not just to understand the disease’s long shadow, but also to predict who’s at highest risk of lingering symptoms and learn whether treatments in the acute phase of illness can head them off.
For Götz Martin Richter, a radiologist at the Klinikum Stuttgart in Germany, what’s especially striking is that just as the illness’ acute symptoms vary unpredictably, so, too, do those that linger. Richter thinks of two patients he has treated: a middle-aged man who experienced mild pneumonia from COVID-19, and an elderly woman already suffering from chronic leukemia and arterial disease, who almost died from the virus and had to be resuscitated. Three months later, the man with the mild case “falls asleep all day long and cannot work,” Richter says. The woman has minimal lung damage and feels fine.
