February 14, 2024
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Key takeaways:
- The risk for fatigue and chronic fatigue is elevated among people who had COVID-19.
- The risk is especially higher for chronic fatigue, which is around four times more likely after COVID-19.
COVID-19 may quadruple a person’s risk for chronic fatigue, new study findings suggest.
Fatigue is frequently mentioned as a common symptom of long COVID, along with brain fog, headache, shortness of breath and many other conditions.
Data derived from Vu QM, et al. Emerg Infect Dis. 2024;doi:10.3201/eid3003.231194.
To estimate the incidence of fatigue caused by COVID-19, researchers from the CDC and University of Washington compared the electronic health records of more than 4,500 patients who had COVID-19 between February 2020 and February 2021 with the records of more than 9,000 people who did not.
They found that the risk for any fatigue in the ensuing 11 months was 68% higher in the COVID-19 group compared with controls (HR = 1.68; 95% CI, 1.48-1.92), according to results published Wednesday in Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Based on 81 cases in the COVID-19 arm, the difference in risk for chronic fatigue was even higher. The researchers calculated that patients with COVID-19 were more than four times more likely to develop chronic fatigue compared with controls (4.32; 95% CI, 2.9-6.43).
Women were 39% more likely to experience any fatigue after COVID-19 compared with men (HR = 1.39; 95% CI, 1.15-1.69), and some comorbidities also increased a person’s risk, especially hypertension (27% increased risk) and gastritis or duodenitis (93%).
Patients with COVID-19 who developed fatigue fared far worse clinically, the researchers reported. Their rate of hospitalization (25.6%) was nearly double that of the control group (RR = 1.88; 95% CI, 1.57-2.24) and their rate of death (5.3%) was more than double that of controls (RR = 2.34; 95% CI, 1.5-3.66).
“The high incidence rates of fatigue reinforce the need for public health actions to prevent infections, to provide clinical care to those in need, and to find effective treatments for post–acute COVID-19 fatigue,” the researchers wrote.
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