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People who were hospitalised with COVID-19 and continued to experience symptoms five months later, show limited further recovery one year after hospital discharge according to the latest results of a major national study.

Illustrative image of the Coronavirus © Shutterstock

The latest findings of the PHOSP-COVID study, which involves several researchers from the University of Oxford including Professor Ling-Pei Ho of the MRC Human Immunology Unit (MRC HIU), have been published on the medRxiv pre-print website.

Researchers from 53 institutions and 83 hospitals across the UK assessed 2,230 adults who had been hospitalised with COVID-19. The researchers found that one year after hospital discharge, fewer than 3 in 10 patients on the study reported they felt fully recovered, largely unchanged from 2.5 in 10 at five months. The most common ongoing symptoms were fatigue, muscle pain, physically slowing down, poor sleep and breathlessness.

Participants felt their health-related quality of life remained substantially worse one year after hospital discharge, compared to pre-COVID. This suggests the physical and mental health impairments reported in the study are unlikely to be pre-existing conditions.

Read the full story on the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine website.