Nearly Two-Thirds of Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients Still Have Organ Damage

Nearly two-thirds of coronavirus hospital patients are still suffering organ damage months after being discharged, a small study has warned.
Oxford University researchers found 60 per cent of patients had scarring or inflammation in their lungs three months after beating the virus, the Daily Mail reported.

MRI scans showed 30 per cent had lasting damage to their kidney, 26 per cent in their heart and 10 per cent in their liver.

The patients also showed signs of tissue changes in parts of their brain, and performed poorer in cognitive and physical tests.

Two-thirds suffered from persistent breathlessness and 55 per cent showed signs of mental and physical fatigue.

The study of 58 COVID-19 survivors adds to the growing concern about the health and wellbeing of people who manage to beat a bad bout of the disease.

As many as 60,000 people in the UK are thought to be suffering from so-called 'Long COVID', which the NHS officially recognized as a condition earlier this month and began drawing up guidelines for doctors on how to treat it.

Most people who contract COVID-19 will recover within a fortnight, suffering a fever, cough and losing their sense of smell or taste for several days.

The small number who are hospitalized are either elderly or have underlying health conditions - including heart disease, diabetes and asthma.

For this reason, the team at Oxford said it's 'difficult to know' how much of the damage seen in patients' organs was 'pre-existing and how much has been caused by COVID-19'.

Initial findings from the study, called C-MORE, have been published online as a pre-print on the website MedRxiv. It means the research has not been peer-reviewed by independent scientists.

The study looked at 58 patients with moderate to severe laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, who had been admitted for treatment at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust between March and May 2020.   -TASNIM-