What We’ve Learned Treating 4,000 Patients With Long COVID-19

foreign [Music] I'm chief of the division of neural infectious diseases and Global neurology at Northwestern Medicine and the co-director of the comprehensive covet Center the Northwestern Medicine comprehensive covet Center was created in 2020 as a pragmatic effort to care for a completely new group of patients those affected by long covid patients affected by long covid have persisting symptoms lasting more than four weeks after acute covid-19 and those symptoms affect their brain their lungs their heart their gastrointestinal tract and other organ we provide a personalized approach to the patients at the comprehensive covet Center depending on their initial symptoms of long covid these may be restricted to the nervous system or affect also the lung and the heart and every combination in between or they really showed that long covid is not a one-size-fits-all you have different category of patients including those who had severe covid-19 pneumonia often requiring intubation in the ICU who may have permanent organ damage once they are coming out of the hospital and they need personalized and Specialized Care on the other hand you have people who had a mild case of covid-19 just sore throat cough that went away but thereafter developed those lingering problems including brain fog fatigue exercise intolerance affecting their quality of life and their ability to work the non-hospitalized population of patients is usually much younger didn't have any disease before developing long covid and they need a different type of approach than those who were hospitalized for covid pneumonia we just published a study of the patients experience during the first 21 months of the comprehensive covet Center where we surveyed more than 1800 patients in more than 2 300 new patient visit and we looked at Patients utilization of the various Specialty Clinic we found that 49 came to neurology 25 came to pulmonology 12 came to Cardiology and the rest went to the other Clinics of the center we also found that 17 percent of patients went to multiple clinics including from one to six clinics total this indicates that long kovid is really a multi-system disease and that as much as covid-19 is a respiratory disease affecting the lung predominantly long covid affects the brain in most patients seen at the center the most common neurogic symptoms reported are brain fog headache muscle pain fatigue and exercise intolerance affecting the quality of life of our patients and also their ability to work we analyze the population of patients seen in the compressive covet Center whether they were hospitalized or non-hospitalized for their acute covid-19 presentation and we saw that among those who are not hospitalized the predominant population was female in their 40s we think that long covid is a new autoimmune syndrome which is caused by the virus sarskov II to confuse the immune system that something is abnormal in the body that needs to be attacked we know that women are more likely than men to develop or other autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis rheumatoid arthritis and lupus for example and so it is not too surprising that women are also more likely to develop long covid than men long kovid is not going away we are seeing patients in our clinics who have the first second third or fourth fifth infection despite vaccination and booster and sometimes they develop blancovid symptoms along the way and it is possible that more and more people will be affected by those symptoms in addition the virus continues to evolve and different variants of the virus may cause different manifestations and we need to be aware that this is a possibility and we need to continue to be willing and able to care for those patients [Music]

Channel: Breakthroughs for Physicians

Views: 22,165

Keywords: Igor Koralnik, long COVID, long COVID-19, Northwestern Medicine Neurology, Comprehensive COVID-19 Center

Id: AXp0SNBtIhw

Length: 5min 7sec (307 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023