February 1, 2023 – In a new study, a team of University of Missouri researchers made an unexpected discovery: people experiencing long-lasting effects from COVID-19 — known as “long COVID” or post-COVID conditions — are susceptible to developing only seven health symptoms for up to a year following the infection. They are: fast-beating heart, hair loss, fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, joint pain and obesity.
To develop their findings, the team reviewed Oracle Cerner real-world data from electronic medical records containing de-identified information for medical research purposes. After examining data from a total of 52,461 patients at 122 healthcare facilities across the United States, the researchers selected the top 47 most commonly reported health symptoms from long COVID to examine for this study. Then, the researchers looked for any comparisons in the reported health symptoms — many also shared by other viral respiratory infections — among people in three different subgroups:
- People diagnosed with COVID-19 but do not have any common viral respiratory infections like influenza or pneumonia
- People with common viral respiratory infections but do not have COVID-19
- People who do not have COVID-19 or any other common viral respiratory infections.
Chi-Ren Shyu, director of the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics and the Paul K. and Dianne Shumaker Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the MU College of Engineering, said the results could benefit ongoing efforts by fellow researchers to study various impacts of COVID-19.
“Now, researchers will be able to better understand how SARS-CoV-2 may mutate or evolve by creating new connections that we may not have known about before,” Shyu said. “Going forward we can use electronic medical records to quickly detect subgroups of patients who may have these long-term health conditions.”