People who recover from severe cases of COVID-19 are more likely to develop mental health problems such as anxiety and depression up to a year after recovery, according to new research.
Epidemiologists studied patient records for over 153,000 veterans who recovered from severe or mild cases of COVID-19 in January 2021 and compared them in an article for the BMJ to people who were hospitalized for another reason and to people hospitalized before the pandemic. After following up with the patients about a year later, the scientists concluded that those who had COVID-19 were 60% more likely than other people to have problems including anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Those with more severe infections requiring hospitalization were also more likely to experience mental health problems post-recovery.
“Despite evidence showing that the burden of mental health disorders might have increased among the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic, our results suggested that people with COVID-19 are at even higher risk of incident mental health disorders than their contemporaries without COVID-19,” the epidemiologists wrote.
They were also 46% more likely to have suicidal thoughts, 34% more likely to develop opioid use disorders, 41% more likely to develop sleep disorders, and 80% more likely to experience brain fog.
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The study is part of an effort in the scientific community to understand the phenomenon of “long COVID,” a range of symptoms that could afflict a person weeks or months after recovering from COVID-19. People dealing with long-term effects of COVID-19 have reported feeling fatigue, troubling cognitive symptoms such as memory loss or confusion, and gastrointestinal problems, among other symptoms.
There has been some skepticism among doctors about the existence of such a disorder because the long-lasting suite of symptoms, including those that point to mental illness, often cannot be explained in clinical tests.
The researchers responsible for the study believed their findings were indicative of a need to understand the long-term mental health effects of COVID-19, which led to 146.6 million infections in the United States even before the winter omicron wave, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates of COVID-19 disease burden. Globally, more than 420 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported to date.
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“Given the large and growing number of people with COVID-19 … the absolute risks of incident mental health disorders might translate into large numbers of potentially affected people around the world,” they said. “Our results should be used to promote awareness of the increased risk of mental health disorders among survivors of acute COVID-19.”
