People experiencing long-lasting effects from COVID-19—known as “long COVID” or post-COVID conditions—are susceptible to developing only seven health symptoms for up to a year following the infection. After examining data from a total of 52,461 patients at 122 health care facilities across the United States, the researchers selected the top 47 most commonly reported health symptoms from long COVID to examine for the study. People who do not have COVID-19 or any other common viral respiratory infections.

In March 2022, an estimated 1.5 million people in the UK reported long COVID symptoms, mainly fatigue, shortness of breath, loss of smell, loss of taste, and difficulty concentrating. But the clinical effects of long COVID one year after mild infection and their association with age, sex, COVID-19 variants, and vaccination status are still unclear. The researchers compared conditions in unvaccinated people, with and without COVID-19 infection, controlling for age, sex and COVID-19 variants, during early and late time periods after infection.

The team tracked how often these people went on to later be diagnosed with 70 different health conditions possibly linked to long covid up to a year later, and compared them to controls matched in age and other factors who never tested positive for covid-19 during the same period of time. Bivas-Benital’s team found that mild covid-19 cases had a higher risk on average of being diagnosed with several different conditions compared to uninfected people within one to six months after infection.