Photo/Illutration An article published by the National Center for Global Health and Medicine (Nami Sugiura)

A recent survey found that women tend to suffer from the long-term aftereffects of COVID-19 more than men.

The National Center for Global Health and Medicine conducted a survey from February 2020 to March this year of 457 people who had recovered from the novel coronavirus. 

The survey found that female respondents suffered from fatigue, taste and smell disorders and hair loss more than the male respondents did.

Shinichiro Morioka, who heads the organization’s Disease Control and Prevention Center, said the reasons women are more likely to develop these symptoms “have yet to be definitively determined.”

“In the acute stage, being male, being old and being obese are considered to be high risks for developing severe COVID-19 symptoms,” he said. “But they turned out to be opposite in terms of some of the risks of developing aftereffects of COVID-19.”

“We are conducting research to determine the cause of that,” he said.

The researchers asked the respondents how severe their symptoms were in the acute stage, what kinds of treatment they received and if they still had lingering symptoms.

For symptoms in the acute stage, 378 respondents, or 84.4 percent, said their symptoms were mild and that they did not require oxygen to be administered to them.

Fifty-seven respondents, or 12.7 percent, said their symptoms were moderate, while 13, or 2.9 percent, said they suffered from severe symptoms. Nine respondents did not provide data.

The median survey response time was 248.5 days, from the day a symptom emerged to the date of answering the survey.

The results show that the risk of a woman developing fatigue was about two times higher than the men. For taste disorder, it was about 1.6 times higher. For smell disorder, it was about 1.9 times higher than men. For hair loss, it was about three times higher.

Among those who developed a taste disorder, women suffered from the symptom for about a month longer than the men who developed the same symptom.

Young people and skinny people were also likely to develop taste and smell disorders, the survey found.

The survey also found that aftereffects from COVID-19, sometimes called long-COVID or post-COVID-19 syndrome, can last for quite some time.

According to the survey, 26.3 percent of the respondents said they had some aftereffects even after six months from the date they started showing symptoms or from their diagnosis.

Even some who had only developed mild symptoms of COVID-19 suffered from lingering aftereffects.

One year after, 8.8 percent of respondents still suffered from aftereffects.

Among the symptoms that lasted four weeks or longer, smell disorder was the most prevalent, with 22.8 percent of respondents reporting that they suffered from it.

On top of that, 20.8 percent said they had difficulties concentrating and 20.4 percent said they had a lasting sense of fatigue.

The researchers published the survey results, which have not yet been peer reviewed, on Sept. 23 in an online medical archive for research preprints, available at (https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.22.21263998).

Related News