“I didn’t think I’d find this and to be honest because of the general perception of people who experience these lingering effects of COVID are older or at least middle aged and older, I was shocked to see that these young adults predominantly 18-21 are experiencing really serious symptoms like chest pain,” said Julie Walsh-Messinger assistant professor of psychology at the University of Dayton.
For a little over a month, Messinger and a team of other researchers surveyed 43 students that had COVID, 51% of them being “long haulers” or having post-COVID syndrome, with symptoms that continued over 28 days and 30% had symptoms for 50 days or longer. Most long haulers had a mild to moderate case of the virus and weren’t sick enough to be hospitalized. They are no longer contagious but still live with the sometimes crippling leftover symptoms of the virus.
An additional 58 students without COVID-19 were surveyed to serve as a control for research to further prove that the symptoms were indeed coronavirus related.
“They served as a control group but helped us look to see which of these prolonged symptoms of the ones who did have COVID were experiencing to differentiate the ones that are more likely to be COVID related versus just general stress. Stress of being a college student, academic stress, and of course, like we are all experiencing, stress associated with this pandemic,” she said.
Although the findings could prove to be helpful, it wasn’t the initial focus of the study.
“The research question we were asking was about the long term effects of olfactory loss on mental health and on social function and engagement. As part of that we were interested in COVID symptoms particularly smell loss associated with COVID, but when we started to look at the data it became clear that we had a large proportion, over half of our sample, got COVID who were experiencing these prolonged symptoms. It was then we decided to look at that more deeply or more closely,” she said.
Messinger said that the main takeaways from this study is that there is still a lot to learn about the virus and that children and young adults are not immune.
“Young adults are not immune or just getting COVID for a week or two and bouncing back to their normal lives, they are also at risk for these lingering effects, and we still don’t know what those will be five years from now, 10 years from now.”
Those that are long haulers can find support groups through social media and the Pulmonary Wellness Foundation offers free resources and support for people experiencing lingering COVID-19 symptoms as well as remote and in-person consultations and rehabilitation.
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