The associations of long-COVID symptoms, clinical characteristics and affective psychological constructs in a non-hospitalized cohort, 2022, Ocsovszky

Abstract

Objective
The effects of COVID-19, especially long-COVID, on the psychological health is incompletely understood. We aimed to evaluate the mid-term associations of the long-COVID symptoms and affective factors in a cohort of non-hospitalized patients.

Method
A total of 166 patients were enrolled in this study, including 119 sedentary/non-athlete and 47 athlete subjects at the Post-COVID Outpatient Clinic of Semmelweis University. Clinical data regarding acute and long-term symptoms were obtained and detailed laboratory testing was carried out. Demographic data and psychological tests were collected.

Results
We found a positive association between the level of depressive symptoms and anxiety and long-COVID symptom count, while life satisfaction and social support correlated negatively with the long-COVID symptom count. Higher haemoglobin levels and lower LDL-cholesterol were also shown to be moderating factors. A regression model showed that symptoms during acute infection, depression, age, and life satisfaction are predictors of the long-COVID symptom count. The presence of pre-existing affective or anxiety problems was also associated with higher reported long-COVID symptom count. Furthermore, we found significant association between pre-existing mental health problems and the investigated psychological constructs.

Conclusion
It appears that long COVID-19 is associated with acute symptoms and mental factors. Depression and anxiety have been shown to have a negative effect on symptom perception, and also contribute to a higher number of symptoms in a non-hospitalized sample. Our study suggests bi-directional interconnection between clinical and psychological factors.

Open access, https://akjournals.com/view/journal...022.00030/article-10.1556-2060.2022.00030.xml

 

@Wyva , tagging you as these are all Hungarian researchers.

 

The first sentence is about a one way interconnection, the second seems tagged on the end to deflect criticism.

 

Thanks. (I wonder why I haven't seen this. This was published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and I follow two (!) of their repositories. Maybe there is a delay in uploading but I'm also overall not satisfied with those repositores regardless of this.)

There's a lot to unpack here. If anyone is interested, they used the Beck Depression scale. I've first heard of this in my own group from a patient who brought it up as another example for a scale similar to the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS).

Beck's scale has the same problem as some other depression scales: it also measures ME/CFS symptoms and the effect of ME/CFS on someone's life and cannot tell the difference between depression and those things. There is also this paper by Leonard Jason and others that shows this scale has a lot of overlap with ME/CFS symptoms and can be problematic:
Factor analysis of the Beck Depression Inventory-II with patients with chronic fatigue syndrome

I also wonder what kind of self-reported questionnaire they used for the history of mental problems.

One thing I'm not happy about (I mean there's a lot but one more thing): This came out of Semmelweis University (no1 medical school in Hungary). Among the authors you can find Béla Merkely, rector of Semmelweis (the rector here is the person leading the university).

My problem is that he may become the new person responsible for healthcare in Hungary. He may not but there is a high chance. During the pandemic he often said things that fit the government's plans in connection with the pandemic in that particular moment and sometimes these were not scientifically well-grounded. I also mentioned it in the Visegrád group thread that the original minister in this role kept saying and doing odd things so he was moved to the background. It was expected he won't be asked to continue in the new government. And it is true: they are reorganizing these ministries now and although it is not clear who will be directly responsible for healthcare yet (it doesn't have its own ministry and belongs to a bigger one), Merkely was seen attending the prime minister's official re-election ceremony in the Parliament.

Why this matters is that the politician Ádám Kósa, who promised to help ME/CFS patients, will write to the person who healthcare will belong to. And if it is Merkely, who gives his name to a paper like this, that doesn't look so good.

 

What this shows, bizarrely, is that these healthcare professionals are completely baffled by the concept of illness, and genuinely cannot understand that asking sick people how they're doing will yield the expected response of: not great.

As in literally the entire idea that being ill is a bad experience is just unthinkable, does not compute. It has to be reattributed as a cause, there is simply no ability to think that they are effects, compounded by asking bad questions with ambiguous answers that conflate illness with mood.

If these were professional chefs, an equivalent level of incompetence would be genuinely not understanding that serving a meal is expected at a certain time and that serving it 5h late, cold and sad, is unacceptable. It's genuinely hard to process how professionals can fail at such a basic level.

Because for people who talk about bi-direction, they only accept one. And clearly so, which makes the bi-directional mention here especially hypocritical, as it is clearly simply there to deflect criticism from their over-simplistic thinking.

Health problems require experts. This is not expertise, not even close. The standards have to be raised significantly.