Federally Funded Study Seeks To Assess Long COVID During Pregnancy
As if the health effects of COVID-19 haven't been overwhelming enough over the past year and a half, the thought of having these symptoms carry over into a new generation is almost too much to consider. However, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is providing grant funds to support a four-year follow-up study on the potential long-term effects of COVID-19 on women infected with the disease during pregnancy. The study will also follow their offspring for any potential long-term effects.
The study, which will follow 1,500 pregnant patients, is part of NIH’s Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, which seeks to identify why some individuals who have had COVID-19 do not fully recover or develop symptoms after recovery. Commonly known as “long COVID,” these conditions affect all ages, and symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, difficulty concentrating, sleep disorders, fevers, anxiety and depression.
The study will enroll some participants from an earlier study by the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units (MFMU) Network, a 36-site research collaboration supported by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Participants will be recruited from roughly 4,100 patients with asymptomatic and symptomatic COVID-19 infection during pregnancy who gave birth at MFMU Network hospitals. The research teams will assess patient symptoms periodically during the four-year period and evaluate their offspring for neurologic symptoms and cardiovascular conditions.
Researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine will attempt to understand what proportion of patients with COVID-19 in pregnancy are at risk for long COVID, whether the severity of COVID-19 in pregnancy influences the likelihood of developing long COVID, and how the proportion of patients who develop long COVID after COVID-19 in pregnancy compares to that of non-pregnant women who develop long COVID.
Hopefully any findings from the federally funded research will identify ways to better cope with this disease that seems to have no end.
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