Months After COVID-19 Infection, Rheumatic-Like Symptoms Persist

Dr. Chang

Ann Marie Chang, MD, associate professor, emergency medicine, Jefferson University Hospitals, Philadelphia, also underscored that a better understanding of patients who experience persistent symptoms post-COVID-19 infection may help focus more attention on other conditions with similar long-term symptoms, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, for which a better understanding has long been needed.

Dr. Chang is leading efforts at Jefferson University to enroll patients in a U.S. National Institutes of Health study, the Innovative Support for Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infections (COVID-19) Registry (INSPIRE), to better understand the range of persistent symptoms of long-haulers.¹¹

As both a physician who has treated COVID-19 patients and someone with firsthand experience of persistent symptoms after recovering from acute COVID-19 infection in March 2020, Dr. Chang says she hopes the study will provide needed information on questions about why some patients develop these symptoms, how to treat those who do and how to prevent the onset of persistent symptoms.

“Right now, as a physician, it feels like riding a bike that we’re building at the same time—there is such a rapid reassessment of recommendations for a condition that we don’t necessarily know how to treat,” Dr. Chang said in a Feb. 10 press release.¹²

As someone who knows what it feels like to have a condition without a clear diagnosis and treatment, she stressed the need for clinicians to recognize the condition.

“For patients whose quality of life has been so severely impacted, it’s really scary to hear from their doctors that we just don’t know what to do for them, and we don’t know when their symptoms will end—is it a year, two years, lifelong? We just don’t know,” Dr. Chang said.¹²

Mary Beth Nierengarten is a freelance medical journalist based in Minneapolis.

References

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