You may have up to a 50% higher risk of developing long-term Covid-19 if you suffer from common psychiatric problems such as anxiety or depression, according to a recent study.
Signs of the disease can include breathing problems, brain fog, chronic cough, changes in taste and smell, extreme fatigue, difficulty performing daily tasks, and sleep disturbances that can last for months or even years after the infection has cleanse the body. .
People who self-identified as having anxiety, depression or loneliness, or who felt extremely stressed or often worried about the coronavirus were more likely to experience prolonged Covid-19, according to the study published this month in JAMA Psychiatry.
“We found that participants with two or more types of psychological distress before infection had a 50% higher risk of contracting Covid,” said study co-author Dr. Siwen Wang, a researcher in the department of nutrition at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public. Health in Boston.
About 40 million adults over the age of 18 in the United States live with an anxiety disorder, and more than 21 million have suffered from major depression, according to national statistics. Many mental health conditions often overlap, with concurrent diagnoses, experts say. More than a fifth of adults in the US (22%) and UK (23%) say they often or always feel lonely, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“Having higher levels of psychological distress prior to Covid infection also increased the risk of long-term Covid by 50%,” Wang said. “These people also reported more symptoms seen in long Covid.”
It’s possible that some could use the study’s findings to support a hypothesis that post-Covid illness is psychosomatic, a widespread belief in the early days of the pandemic, said Dr. Wesley Ely, a professor of medicine and critical care at the Medical Center of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He did not participate in the study.
Instead, the study’s message should be that people with existing psychological distress are closer to the “catastrophe” of long-term Covid, said Ely, co-director of Vanderbilt’s Center for Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship.
“Imagine 10 people are running a race and you give the lead to five people,” Ely said. “These are people who already had a mental health problem – they’re just closer to the unfortunate finish line of the long Covid.”
The idea that mental distress can affect the body in negative ways is not new. It’s also a two-way street: Having a chronic illness is closely linked to the development of depression and other psychological disorders.
With common noncommunicable disorders like heart disease, “depression/anxiety/emotional distress seems to play a role,” said Dr. Joseph Bienvenu, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. , in an email. He did not participate in the study.
People with severe depression may develop blood pressure problems and may be more likely to have a heart attack. Chronic depression, stress, and anxiety have been linked to insomnia, and a lack of quality sleep is a major culprit in the development of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other disorders.
And psychological distress has been shown to weaken the immune system, said study co-author Dr. Angela Roberts, associate professor of pulmonary and critical care at Stanford University in California.
“Your brain and your immune system are very closely linked together,” Roberts said. “Studies have shown that when you’re depressed or stressed, your immune system doesn’t work as well against targets like viruses and bacteria.”
To do the new study, researchers worked with nearly 55,000 people without a history of Covid-19 who were enrolled in three large longitudinal studies: the Nurses’ Health Study II, the Nurses’ Health Study 3, and the Growing Up Today Study. Participants in these studies tend to be predominantly female and white, which may limit how generalizable the results are to a broader population, the study said.
Participants were asked about their mental health in April 2020, quite early in the pandemic. They continued to complete mental health surveys monthly for six months and then quarterly. At the end of one year, the researchers narrowed the subject pool down to nearly 3,200 people who had developed Covid-19 and met the study’s requirements.
“This study is particularly nice in that the participants’ baseline characteristics were independently assessed in time for their subsequent Covid symptoms,” said Johns Hopkins’ Bienvenu.
Compared to people without mental distress, people with depression and loneliness were 1.32 times more likely to experience long-term Covid symptoms. Participants who were quite worried about the coronavirus – mainly people of color, women and those with asthma – were 1.37 times more likely to develop long-term Covid, the study found.
Stress was associated with a greater risk – 1.42 times more likely – but people with higher levels of perceived stress were almost 50% more likely to develop post-Covid symptoms, said Wang, the study’s co-author.
All associations between psychological distress and long-term Covid remained significant, even after the researchers adjusted for demographics, body weight, smoking status, and a history of asthma, cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure or cholesterol.
Additionally, all types of psychological distress except loneliness were associated with a higher risk of being unable to complete activities of daily living due to ongoing long-term Covid symptoms.
While many cases of long-term Covid are mild and resolve within a few months, other patients continue to suffer for a long time. Some still have not recovered their quality of life more than two years after the pandemic, according to Dr. Aaron Friedberg, clinical assistant professor of internal medicine who works in the Post-Covid Recovery Program at Ohio University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus.
“They can’t think, they can’t breathe. I have a person whose disease is so severe, he basically can’t get out of bed,” Friedberg told CNN in an earlier interview. “I recently saw a person who is still not working due to Covid symptoms two years later.”
