Abstract
Background:
COVID-19 is a respiratory disease that has caused a modern global pandemic. A subset of patients continues to complain of dyspnea several weeks and months after the initial acute COVID-19 infection. This project was a retrospective analysis of patients diagnosed with Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 infection (PASC) within an Outpatient COVID Care Center in Central PA. This study focused on identifying any correlations between the breathlessness of long COVID-19 patients and multiple other factors.
Methods:
After IRB approval, a retrospective study using electronic data from Wellspan Health (York PA) Outpatient COVID Care Center was conducted. 97 patients with pulmonary function testing recorded in the electronic medical record from June 2021 to March 2022 were included in the study. The retrospective study analyzed factors including age, prior to COVID smoking history, rest and/or exercise hypoxemia, history of prior pulmonary diseases, post-bronchodilator spirometry, total lung capacity, diffusing capacity, intubation history due to acute COVID-19, current symptoms of depression as shown by patient health care questionnaire (PHQ6), current symptoms of anxiety as shown by the general anxiety disorder score (GAD7), and cognitive function as shown by Montreal cognitive assessment (MoCA0).
Results:
78/97 patients identified dyspnea as a complaint 4-6 weeks after acute COVID-19 infection. Statistical analysis with Chi-square, independent T-test and Mann-Whitney U test demonstrated a P-value greater than 0.05 in all analyses indicating no statistical predictor of post-COVID-19 shortness of breath among the tested considerations. Although they were not statistically significant in this study, factors such as abnormal DLCO, TLC, and elevated scores of PHQ6, and GAD7 showed an interesting trend towards a correlation with post-COVID-19 shortness of breath
Conclusions:
COVID-19 continues to affect patients, even after the initial infection. This study on long COVID-19 patients showed no statistically significant factors that predicted or correlated with ongoing dyspnea. Limitations to our study include small sample size and only the use of single-center patients. Further research should be conducted with larger sample size and continued factors such as DLCO, TLC, anxiety, depression, and other factors that could predict or influence dyspnea in long COVID-19 patients.
Covid PASC
Test variable
Dyspnea post Covid (Y/N?)
Mean
SD
p-value
Age Years
No
56.50
19.672
0.593
Yes
54.45
13.250
FVC (% pred)
No
92.44
16.418
0.729
Yes
94.04
17.748
FEV1 (% pred)
No
89.22
14.996
0.768
Yes
90.63
18.781
DLCO (% pred)
No
86.33
19.867
0.338
Yes
91.05
18.423
TLC (% pred)
No
94.06
1.16587
0.285
Yes
98.96
1.22312
PHQ6Patient Health
No
9.81
13.318
0.290
Yes
9.63
6.958
GAD7Anxiety
No
6.94
7.98
0.355
Yes
7.79
6.063
MoCACognitive Assessment
No
19.75
2.864
0.749
Yes
19.37
4.552
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