Long COVID—six months of prospective follow-up of changes in symptom profiles of non-hospitalised children and young people after SARS-CoV-2 testing: A national matched cohort study (The CLoCk) study

Terence Stephenson, Snehal M. Pinto Pereira*, Manjula D. Nugawela, Kelsey McOwat, Ruth Simmons, Trudie Chalder, Tamsin Ford, Isobel Heyman, Olivia V. Swann, Lana Fox-Smith, Natalia K. Rojas, Emma Dalrymple, Shamez N. Ladhani, Roz Shafran

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

22 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Background Little is known about the prevalence and natural trajectory of post-COVID symptoms in young people, despite very high numbers of young people having acute COVID. To date, there has been no prospective follow-up to establish the pattern of symptoms over a 6-month time period. Methods A non-hospitalised, national sample of 3,395 (1,737 SARS-COV-2 Negative;1,658 SARS-COV-2 Positive at baseline) children and young people (CYP) aged 11–17 completed questionnaires 3 and 6 months after PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection between January and March 2021 and were compared with age, sex and geographically-matched test-negative CYP. Results Three months after a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, 11 of the 21 most common symptoms reported by >10% of CYP had reduced. There was a further decline at 6 months. By 3 and 6 months the prevalence of chills, fever, myalgia, cough and sore throat of CYP who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 reduced from 10–25% at testing to <3%. The prevalence of loss of smell declined from 21% to 5% at 3 months and 4% at 6 months. Prevalence of shortness of breath and tiredness also declined, but at a lower rate. Among test-negatives, the same common symptoms and trends were observed at lower prevalence’s. Importantly, in some instances (shortness of breath, tiredness) the overall prevalence of specific individual symptoms at 3 and 6 months was higher than at PCR-testing because these symptoms were reported in new cohorts of CYP who had not reported the specific individual symptom previously. Conclusions In CYP, the prevalence of specific symptoms reported at time of PCR-testing declined with time. Similar patterns were observed among test-positives and test-negatives and new symptoms were reported six months post-test for both groups suggesting that symptoms are unlikely to exclusively be a specific consequence of SARS-COV-2 infection. Many CYP experienced unwanted symptoms that warrant investigation and potential intervention.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0277704
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume18
Issue number3 March
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2023

Bibliographical note

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© 2023 Stephenson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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