Systematic Evaluation of Chronic Injury Caused by COVID-19

A special issue of Healthcare (ISSN 2227-9032). This special issue belongs to the section "Coronaviruses (CoV) and COVID-19 Pandemic".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 April 2021) | Viewed by 23142

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Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, Atherothrombosis and Vascular Biology, Melbourne, Australia
Interests: atherothrombosis and unstable atherosclerotic plaque; urine proteomics; micro-RNA for anti-atherosclerotic therapy; gut microbiome; single cell RNA-seq; animal model
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The daily increasing cases and deaths caused by COVID-19 continue to shock the whole world, since the first reported case in Wuhan City in China in December 2019 and the WHO declared the global pandemic in March 2020. Millions of people are now infected, and billions are involved in the lockdown. The mysterious question is regarding its variable mortality rate across nations. China reported an approximately 3.9% mortality rate, however it has increased to over 12% mortality in Italy, Belgium, and the UK. Has the virus evolved through the generation of many cascades of human to human transfection? Could race be a determinate factor of the high mortality? There are simply too many outstanding questions that require collective efforts from multi-disciplinary scientists. The symptoms of COVID-19 are initially reported to be flu-like symptoms including fever, sore throat, cough, fatigue, and shortness of breath. Nevertheless, some have reported less-typical symptoms such as profound loss of smell, loss of taste, diarrhea, and to the very extreme that there are no symptoms at all for some confirmed patients.

In this Special Issue, we are interested to see what chronic injuries may be caused by COVID-19? Submissions could be case reports from hospitals, clinical observation from ICUs, or clinical consultations of follow-ups. As the world is tackling this great challenge, we will have an open mind in reviewing your manuscript in an effort to collect as much evidence as possible.

Dr. Yung-Chih Chen
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • immune response
  • digestive system
  • pericarditis
  • pericardial effusion
  • chronic kidney injury
  • pneumonia
  • dyspnea

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

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11 pages, 575 KiB  
Article
Feasibility Trial of an eHealth Intervention for Health-Related Quality of Life: Implications for Managing Patients with Chronic Pain During the COVID-19 Pandemic
by John C. Licciardone and Vishruti Pandya
Healthcare 2020, 8(4), 381; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare8040381 - 1 Oct 2020
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 3859
Abstract
Purpose: This study was conducted to determine the feasibility of providing an eHealth intervention for health-related quality of life (HRQOL) to facilitate patient self-management. Methods: A randomized controlled trial was conducted from 2019–2020 within the Pain Registry for Epidemiological, Clinical, and Interventional Studies [...] Read more.
Purpose: This study was conducted to determine the feasibility of providing an eHealth intervention for health-related quality of life (HRQOL) to facilitate patient self-management. Methods: A randomized controlled trial was conducted from 2019–2020 within the Pain Registry for Epidemiological, Clinical, and Interventional Studies and Innovation. Eligible patients included those with chronic low back pain and a SPADE (sleep disturbance, pain interference with activities, anxiety, depression, and low energy/fatigue) cluster score ≥ 55 based on the relevant scales from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System instrument with 29 items (PROMIS-29). Patients were randomized to the eHealth treatment group, which received a tailored HRQOL report and interpretation guide, or to a wait-list control group. The primary outcome was change in the SPADE cluster score, including its five component scales, over 3 months. Secondary outcomes were changes in low back pain intensity and back-related disability. Treatment effects were measured using the standardized mean difference (SMD) in change scores between groups. The eHealth intervention was also assessed by a survey of the experimental treatment group 1 month following randomization. Results: A total of 102 patients were randomized, including 52 in the eHealth treatment group and 50 in the wait-list control group, and 100 (98%) completed the trial. A majority of patients agreed that the HRQOL report was easy to understand (86%), provided new information (79%), and took actions to read or learn more about self-management approaches to improve their HRQOL (77%). Although the eHealth intervention met the criteria for a small treatment effect in improving the overall SPADE cluster score (SMD = 0.24; p= 0.23) and anxiety (SMD = 0.24; p = 0.23), and for a small-to-medium treatment effect in improving depression (SMD = 0.37; p = 0.06) and back-related disability (SMD = 0.36; p = 0.07), none of these results achieved statistical significance because of limited sample size. Conclusion: Given the feasibility of rapid online deployment, low cost, and low risk of adverse events, this eHealth intervention for HRQOL may be useful for patients with chronic pain during the COVID-19 pandemic. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Systematic Evaluation of Chronic Injury Caused by COVID-19)
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Review

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17 pages, 286 KiB  
Review
Could Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Be an Effective Treatment for Long COVID and Post COVID-19 Fatigue Syndrome? Lessons from the Qure Study for Q-Fever Fatigue Syndrome
by Mark Vink and Alexandra Vink-Niese
Healthcare 2020, 8(4), 552; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare8040552 - 11 Dec 2020
Cited by 50 | Viewed by 18470
Abstract
An increasing number of young and previously fit and healthy people who did not require hospitalisation continue to have symptoms months after mild cases of COVID-19. Rehabilitation clinics are already offering cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as an effective treatment for long COVID and [...] Read more.
An increasing number of young and previously fit and healthy people who did not require hospitalisation continue to have symptoms months after mild cases of COVID-19. Rehabilitation clinics are already offering cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as an effective treatment for long COVID and post-COVID-19 fatigue syndrome based on the claims that it is effective for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)—the most common post-infectious syndrome—as no study into the efficacy of CBT for post-COVID-19 fatigue syndrome has been published. Re-analyses of these studies, however, showed that CBT did not lead to objective improvements in heterogeneous groups of ME/CFS patients, nor did it restore the ability to work. The group of patients with long COVID and post-COVID-19 fatigue syndrome, on the other hand, is homogeneous. We therefore analysed the Dutch Qure study, as it studied the efficacy of CBT in a homogeneous group of patients who developed Q-fever fatigue syndrome—which affects up to 30% of patients—after the largest reported outbreak of Q-fever, to see if CBT might potentially be an effective treatment for long-haulers after COVID-19 infection. Our reanalysis found that the Qure study suffered from many serious methodological problems, which included relying on one subjective primary outcome in a study without a control group for the non-blinded CBT treatment group, using a post hoc definition of improvement, waiting 2 years before publishing their objective actometer results and ignoring the null effect of said results. Moreover, only 10% of participants achieved a clinically meaningful subjective improvement in fatigue as a result of CBT according to the study’s own figures. Consequently, CBT has no subjective clinically meaningful effect in nine out of every ten patients that are treated with it. Additionally, the subjective improvement in fatigue was not matched by an improvement in disability, even though the disability was fatigue related according to the researchers. On top of this, CBT did not lead to an objective improvement in physical performance. Therefore, it cannot be said that CBT is an effective treatment for Q-fever fatigue syndrome either. It seems therefore unlikely that CBT will reduce disability or lead to objective improvement in long COVID or in post-COVID-19 fatigue syndrome. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Systematic Evaluation of Chronic Injury Caused by COVID-19)
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