Persistent COVID-19 symptoms in a community study of 606,434 people in England

Matthew Whitaker, Joshua Elliott, Marc Chadeau-Hyam, Steven Riley, Ara Darzi, Graham Cooke, Helen Ward and Paul Elliott ()
Additional contact information
Matthew Whitaker: Imperial College London
Joshua Elliott: Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
Marc Chadeau-Hyam: Imperial College London
Steven Riley: Imperial College London
Ara Darzi: Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
Graham Cooke: Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
Helen Ward: Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
Paul Elliott: Imperial College London

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Long COVID remains a broadly defined syndrome, with estimates of prevalence and duration varying widely. We use data from rounds 3–5 of the REACT-2 study (n = 508,707; September 2020 – February 2021), a representative community survey of adults in England, and replication data from round 6 (n = 97,717; May 2021) to estimate the prevalence and identify predictors of persistent symptoms lasting 12 weeks or more; and unsupervised learning to cluster individuals by reported symptoms. At 12 weeks in rounds 3–5, 37.7% experienced at least one symptom, falling to 21.6% in round 6. Female sex, increasing age, obesity, smoking, vaping, hospitalisation with COVID-19, deprivation, and being a healthcare worker are associated with higher probability of persistent symptoms in rounds 3–5, and Asian ethnicity with lower probability. Clustering analysis identifies a subset of participants with predominantly respiratory symptoms. Managing the long-term sequelae of COVID-19 will remain a major challenge for affected individuals and their families and for health services.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29521-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-29521-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29521-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().