Impact of long-COVID on health-related quality of life in Japanese COVID-19 patients

  1. Shinya Tsuzuki
  2. Yusuke Miyazato
  3. Mari Terada
  4. Shinichiro Morioka
  5. Norio Ohmagari
  6. Philippe Beutels

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Abstract

Background: The empirical basis for a quantitative assessment of the disease burden imposed by long-COVID is currently scant. We aimed to assess the disease burden caused by long-COVID in Japan. Methods: We conducted a cross sectional self-report questionnaire survey. The questionnaire was mailed to 530 eligible patients, who were recovered from acute COVID-19 in April 2021. Answers were classified into two groups; participants who have no symptom and those who have any ongoing symptoms that lasted longer than four weeks at the time of the survey. We compared health-related quality of life scores estimated by the EQ-5D-3L questionnaire between these two groups after adjusting basic characteristics of the participants by propensity score matching. Results: 349 participants reported no symptoms and 108 reported any symptoms at the time of the survey. The participants who reported any symptoms showed a lower value on a Visual Analogue Scale (median 70 [IQR 60-80]) and on the EQ-5D-3L (median 0.81 [IQR 0.77-1.0]) than those reporting no symptoms (median 85 [IQR 75-90] and 1.0 [IQR 1.0-1.0], respectively). After adjusting for background characteristics, these trends did not change substantially (Visual Analog Scale: median 70 [IQR 60-80] vs 80 [IQR 77-90], EQ-5D-3L: median 0.81 [IQR 0.76-1.0] vs 1.0 [IQR 1.0-1.0]). Conclusions: Due to their long duration, long-COVID symptoms represent a substantial disease burden expressed in impact on health-related quality of life.

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  1. Version published to 10.22541/au.170667903.33433230/v1
  2. Version published to 10.1186/s12955-022-02033-6
  3. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.27.21264225: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIACUC: Ethics approval: According to local ethical guidelines, responses to questionnaire were regarded as patient consent.
    IRB: This study was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of the Center Hospital of the NCGM (NCGM-G-004121-00).
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    There are several limitations in our study. First, our results are based on the questionnaire survey then there are some recall biases in participants’ responses. Similarly, the potential participants were enrolled from the visitors of outpatient department at the national center hospital of infectious diseases in Japan, then the study population might be influenced by selection biases. In addition, we could not take “new variants” into consideration. The difference in severity, infectiousness, and so forth between such new variants and old ones were already reported [30–32], however, there is no solid evidence about the frequency and the severity of “long-COVID” symptoms in new variants. This should be the subject of future study. In addition, we should be careful about the representativeness of the data when we interpret the results because our survey includes a comparatively small number of participants from Japan. However, the response rate of our survey was extremely high (86.2%), and non-response bias may therefore be limited. Furthermore, we compared VAS and EQ-5D-3L values after adjusting participants’ background by propensity score matching.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2021.09.27.21264225 on medRxiv