SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (WXYZ) — One of the lingering mysteries of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the phenomena of long COVID-19.
It's when the active infection clears, but some symptoms like chronic pain, brain fog, shortness of breath, chest pain and intense fatigue remain for weeks, months and yearas.
However, COVID-19 isn't the only infection that can have long-term symptoms. New research is also finding that there are long colds, ones that seem to linger and are hard to shake.
Patricia Norwood had cold symptoms for more than a month, and so did Adrian Villagomez.
"I just laid in bed and didn’t get up, until I felt better. Like a month later," Villagomez said.
This may have been what some experts call long colds.
And this may have been what some experts call long colds.
"It could linger for weeks, even months after the initial infection had resolved," Dr. Brandon Karmo of Orchard Primary Care in Farmington Hills said.
He said the issue was really put into the spotlight by the COVID-19 long-haul symptoms.
"We started to pay more attention that it wasn't just COVID that could cause some of these long cold syndromes, but also some other viral illnesses that have been around for many, many years," he said.
Those include the cold, flu or pneumonia. That's the finding of a study published in the Lancet's eClinical Medicine Journal. Researchers say non-COVID acute respiratory infections can last for a month or more and have wide-ranging effects.
Dr. Lea Monday is an infectious disease expert on faculty at Wayne State School of Medicine and the Detroit Medical Center. She says those with COVID-19 were more likely to suffer from problems with smell, dizziness and brain fog.
"Which is sort of a combination of memory issues and difficulty sort of concentrating on tasks as well as sleep problems," Monday said.
Another key finding is the severity of the illness has little connection to developing long-term cold, flu or COVID-19.
"So it's not that people who have long-term issues after a cold or after flu are the people who are the most sick. Sometimes it's people who have very mild illness," Monday said.
That is an active area of study. So is how to treat the root cause of these long illnesses and their widespread and sometimes elusive problems. Often the best approach to treat the symptoms is by supporting the patient physically and emotionally
"Having compassion and listening. Patients want to feel heard and even just being able to say to a patient, no, you're not crazy. Yes, other people are experiencing this. You're not alone," Monday said.
That feeling of being believed is so important. This study is just one step in understanding long colds and flu. Monday says the diagnoses in this study were self-reported and subject to recall bias.
That can alter results because people with bad symptoms are more likely to remember them. Also, 97% of the people in the study were white and overwhelmingly women.
Monday says how this applies to a more representative sample of both men and women and other races needs to be the subject of more research
