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A Harvard University study has found that depression, anxiety, worries about the pandemic and other sources of distress prior to getting Covid-19 may increase the chance of developing persistent “long-haul" symptoms. Notably, preinfection psychological distress was associated with a higher risk of post-Covid conditions, researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Medicine in Boston said, according to Bloomberg report.
Interestingly, their study, which tracked some 55,000 people over 19 months, found the link increased in a dose-dependent manner and said that those who experienced two or more types of distress before their infection had almost a 50% greater risk of self-reported impairment lasting four weeks or more.
The study notes that lingering symptoms, spanning chronic fatigue and “brain fog" to hair loss and shortness of breath, are estimated to afflict some 10% to 20% of Covid survivors. No one knows yet what causes them, though obesity, female sex, hypertension and a weakened immune system are among purported risk factors.
The Harvard researchers in the study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry Psychological informed that distress has been linked to longer and more severe illness after respiratory tract infections, and it might drive the kind of immune activation and dysregulation implicated in long Covid. Identification and treatment of biological pathways linking distress with long-term Covid-19 symptoms may benefit individuals with post-Covid-19 conditions or other chronic post-infection syndromes," the investigators wrote, noting that “further research should investigate whether interventions that reduce distress help prevent or treat post–Covid conditions."
Long Covid differs substantially from symptoms of mental illness, and the results shouldn’t be misinterpreted as supporting a hypothesis that the condition is psychosomatic, or has no medical explanation, the researchers said. Among respondents who developed post-Covid conditions, more than 40% had no reported distress prior to catching the coronavirus, according to the Bloomberg report.
The study, which examined some common, yet largely unstudied types of distress, including loneliness, used data from other cohort studies in which participants were often white female health-care workers and that might limit how generalizable the study’s findings are to other groups, the authors said.
(With inputs from Bloomberg)