ISLAMABAD:People who felt stressed,anxious,lonely,depressed or worried about Covid before getting infected were at higher risk of developing long-term symptoms from their illness, a new study found.
For the research, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, a team at Harvard looked at survey responses from nearly 55,000 people in the United States and Canada from April 2020 to November 2021.
Of that group, more than 3,000 participants said they’d had Covid, and around 1,400 said they had long Covid, defined as Covid-related symptoms lasting four weeks or longer, NBC news reported .
The results showed that people who reported psychological distress before they got infected had a 32% to 46% increased risk of long Covid, compared to people who did not report such distress. And those who reported high levels of two or more types of psychological distress, such as both depression and anxiety, had a 50% increased risk.
What’s more, the study found a stronger association between long Covid and psychological distress than long Covid and some of its known physical risk factors, such as obesity, asthma and hypertension.
“The factors that we identified are more strongly associated with risk of long Covid than pretty much anything else anyone’s found,” said Andrea Roberts, an author of the study and a senior research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The findings indicate that mental health can have an effect on physical Covid symptoms, the researchers said. But they emphasized that the long Covid symptoms among the patients studied were very real and arose as a result of their infection.
“The results shouldn’t be misinterpreted as supporting post-Covid conditions as psychosomatic,” said Jacqueline Becker, a clinical neuropsychologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York.