COVID-19 reinfection less likely to be severe; cardiac stress test
useful for unexplained lingering breathlessness
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[December 01, 2021]
By Nancy Lapid
(Reuters) - The following is a summary of
some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants
further study to corroborate the findings and that has yet to be
certified by peer review.
Coronavirus reinfections rarely severe
Reinfections with the virus that causes COVID-19 are rarely severe, new
findings suggest. Researchers in Qatar compared 1,304 individuals with a
second SARS-CoV-2 infection with 6,520 people infected with the virus
for the first time. The odds of developing severe disease were 88% lower
for people with second infections, the researchers reported online on
Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Reinfected patients
were 90% less likely to be hospitalized compared to patients infected
for the first time, and no one in the study with a second infection
required intensive care or died from COVID-19, said Dr. Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad
of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar in Doha. "Nearly all reinfections were
mild, perhaps because of immune memory that prevented deterioration of
the infection to more severe outcomes," he said. The risk for severe
illness in people who had been infected before was only about 1% of the
risk associated with initial COVID-19 infections, the researchers
estimated. For half of those with a second infection, the first
infection had occurred more than nine months earlier. It is not clear
how long immune protection against severe reinfection would last, the
researchers noted. If it does last for a long time, they speculate, it
might mean that as the coronavirus becomes endemic, infections could
become "more benign."
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Cardiac stress test useful for lingering breathlessness
In COVID-19 survivors struggling with lingering shortness of breath for
which doctors do not have an explanation, cardiac stress testing may
help identify the cause of the problem, researchers say. "The current
clinical guidelines do not recommend cardiopulmonary exercise testing
out of concern that this test could worsen the patients' symptoms.
However, we found that cardiopulmonary exercise testing was able to
identify reduced exercise capacity in about 45% of patients," said Dr.
Donna Mancini of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New
York. The 18 men and 23 women in the study all had persistent shortness
of breath for more than three months after recovering from COVID-19,
according to a report published on Monday in Journal of the American
College of Cardiology: Heart Failure. They had normal-looking results on
lung function tests, chest X-rays, chest CT scans and echocardiograms.
The exercise tests revealed problems that would otherwise have been
missed, Mancini said. "Low level functional testing recommended by the
guidelines, such as a 6-minute walk test, would not be able to detect
these abnormalities," she said.
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A person wears a face mask on the London underground, as the spread
of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in London, Britain,
November 29, 2021. REUTERS/Hannah McKay
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Experimental smartwatch COVID-19 detection improving
Smartwatch alerting systems for early detection of COVID-19
infection are coming closer to reality, researchers reported on
Monday in Nature Medicine. They tested their new system, developed
with open-source software, in 2,155 wearers of Fitbit, Apple Watch,
Garmin watches or other devices. Ultimately, 84 of the volunteers
were diagnosed with coronavirus infections - including 14 of 18
people without symptoms. Overall, the researchers' algorithms
generated alerts in 67 (80%) of the infected individuals, on average
three days before symptoms began. "This is the first time, to our
knowledge, that asymptomatic detection has been shown for COVID-19,"
they said. Presently, the system mainly depends on measurements of
wearers' resting heart rate, said study leader Michael Snyder of
Stanford University School of Medicine in California. Going forward,
he said he hopes watch manufacturers will be able to provide other
types of highly accurate physiologic data. "Many stressors can
trigger the alerting," Snyder said. "Most of these are easy to spot
- travel, excessive alcohol, even work or other types of stress, so
the user knows to ignore the alerts." When watches can report other
health data such as heart rate variability, respiration rate, skin
temperature, and oxygen levels, it will become easier to distinguish
the COVID-19 cases from other non-COVID-19 events, researchers said.
"Right now we are running this as a research study," Snyder said.
"But soon we hope that FDA approved devices will dominate this
area."
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Additional reporting by Megan Brooks;
Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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