Sexual Dysfunction, Hair Loss Linked With Long COVID

Aug. 12, 2022 – Hair loss, diminished intercourse drive, and erectile dysfunction have joined a listing of better-known signs linked to lengthy COVID in sufferers who weren’t hospitalized, based on findings of a giant research.

Anuradhaa Subramanian, PhD, with the Institute of Applied Health Research on the University of Birmingham within the United Kingdom, led the analysis printed on-line on July 25 in Nature Medicine.

The group analyzed 486,149 grownup digital well being information from sufferers with confirmed COVID within the U.Okay., in comparison with 1.9 million individuals with no prior historical past of COVID, from January 2020 to April 2021. Researchers matched each teams intently when it comes to demographic, social, and medical traits.

New Symptoms

The group recognized 62 signs, together with the well-known indicators of lengthy COVID, comparable to fatigue, lack of sense of odor, shortness of breath, and mind fog, but additionally hair loss, sexual dysfunction, chest ache, fever, lack of management of bowel actions, and limb swelling.

“These differences in symptoms reported between the infected and uninfected groups remained even after we accounted for age, sex, ethnic group, socioeconomic status, body mass index, smoking status, the presence of more than 80 health conditions, and past reporting of the same symptom,” Subramanian and co-researcher Shamil Haroon, PhD, wrote in a abstract of their analysis in The Conversation.

They level out that solely 20 of the signs they discovered are included within the World Health Organization’s medical case definition for lengthy COVID.

They additionally discovered that folks extra prone to have persistent signs 3 months after COVID an infection have been additionally extra prone to be younger, feminine, people who smoke, to belong to sure minority ethnic teams, and to have decrease socioeconomic standing. They have been additionally extra prone to be overweight and have a variety of well being situations.

Haroon, an affiliate medical professor on the University of Birmingham, says that one cause it appeared that youthful individuals have been extra prone to get signs of lengthy COVID could also be that older adults with COVID have been extra prone to be hospitalized and weren’t included on this research.

“Since we only considered non-hospitalized adults, the older adults we included in our study may have been relatively healthier and thus had a lower symptom burden,” he says.

Subramania notes that older sufferers have been extra prone to report lasting COVID-related signs within the research, however when researchers accounted for a variety of different situations that sufferers had earlier than an infection (which usually extra generally occur in older adults), they discovered youthful age as a danger issue for long-term COVID-related signs.

In the research interval, most sufferers have been unvaccinated, and outcomes got here earlier than the widespread Delta and Omicron variants.

More than half (56.6%) of the sufferers contaminated with the virus that causes COVID had been recognized in 2020, and 43.4% in 2021. Less than 5% (4.5%) of the sufferers contaminated with the virus and 4.7% of the sufferers with no recorded proof of a COVID an infection had acquired a minimum of a single dose of a COVID vaccine earlier than the research began.

Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, CA, and editor-in-chief of Medscape (WebMD’s sister website for medical professionals), says extra research have to be accomplished to see whether or not outcomes can be totally different with vaccination standing and evolving variants.

But he notes that this research has a number of strengths: “The hair loss, libido loss, and ejaculation difficulty are all new symptoms,” and the study – large and carefully controlled – shows these issues were among those more likely to occur.

A loss of sense of smell – which is not a new observation – was still the most likely risk shown in the study, followed by hair loss, sneezing, ejaculation difficulty, and reduced sex drive; followed by shortness of breath, fatigue, chest pain associated with breathing difficulties, hoarseness, and fever.

Three Main Clusters of Symptoms

Given the wide range of symptoms, long COVID likely represents a group of conditions, the authors wrote.

They found three main clusters. The largest, with roughly 80% of people with long COVID in the study, faced a broad spectrum of symptoms, ranging from fatigue, to headache, to pain. The second largest group, (15%) mostly had symptoms having to do with mental health and thinking skills, including depression, anxiety, brain fog, and insomnia. The smallest group (5%) had mainly respiratory symptoms such as shortness of breath, coughing, and wheezing.

Putting symptoms in clusters will be important to start understanding what leads to long COVID, says Farha Ikramuddin, MD, a physiatrist and rehabilitation specialist at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis.

She says though the symptoms listed in this paper are new in published research, she has certainly been seeing them over time in her long COVID clinic. (The researchers also used only coded health care data, so they were limited in what symptoms they could discover, she notes.)

Ikramuddin says a strength of the paper is its large size, but she also cautioned that it’s difficult to determine whether members of the comparison group truly had no COVID infection when the information is taken from their medical records. Often, people test at home or assume they have COVID and don’t test, she says, and therefore the information wouldn’t be recorded.

Evaluating non-hospitalized patients is also important, she says, as much of the research on long COVID has come from hospitalized patients, so little has been known about the symptoms of those with milder infections.

“Patients who have been hospitalized and have long COVID look very different from the patients who were not hospitalized,” Ikramuddin says.

One clear message from the paper, she says, is that listening and asking in depth questions on signs are vital with sufferers who’ve had COVID.

“Counseling has also become very important for our patients in the pandemic,” she says.

It may even be vital to do research on returning to work for sufferers with lengthy COVID to see what number of are capable of return and at what capability, Ikramuddin says.