“Long Covid” has been a term for a long time. But the flu can also have a long-term impact on your health. Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, now report this in the journal “The Lancet Infectious Diseases”.
To do this, the researchers analyzed the illness data of US veterans. They compared more than 81,000 patients with Covid-19 who were treated in hospital with around 11,000 hospitalized influenza sufferers, over 18 months after hospital discharge.
This is a special group of patients: Almost all of them were men, they were on average 70 years old, overweight and many suffered from previous illnesses. And whether it was influenza or Covid-19, they were so seriously ill with the respective viral infection that they had to be treated in hospital.
A higher risk of death
In the 18 months after discharge, the long-term problems of flu patients were comparable to those of Covid sufferers, the researchers report. Those affected had various organs damaged and were at higher risk of death, especially in the first month after infection.
Long Covid affected several areas of the body, such as the heart, blood vessels and kidneys. Some patients suffered from fatigue. “However, the flu poses a higher risk to the lungs than COVID-19,” says epidemiologist and author of the study Ziyad Al-Aly. Overall, the long-term consequences of the Covid-19 infection were more severe in the study patients, with more organs affected and the patients had to be hospitalized more often. They also had an approximately 50 percent higher risk of dying than the influenza patients during the study period.
The study did not focus on the question of how often Long Covid or Long Flu occurs in hospital patients. “An important lesson we learned from Sars-CoV-2 is that an infection originally thought to cause only a short illness can also lead to a chronic illness,” Al-Aly said in quoted in a statement from the university.
Al-Aly and colleagues call the long-lasting effects of the flu “Long Flu”, where “flu” is the English short term for “influenza”. The term “Long Covid” has also become common in Germany for the long-term consequences of Covid-19.
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