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. 2021 May 6;26(1):41.
doi: 10.1186/s40001-021-00513-x.

Predictors of the prolonged recovery period in COVID-19 patients: a cross-sectional study

SeyedAhmad SeyedAlinaghi  1 , Ladan Abbasian  2   3 , Mohammad Solduzian  4 , Niloofar Ayoobi Yazdi  5 , Fatemeh Jafari  6 , Alireza Adibimehr  6 , Aazam Farahani  6 , Arezoo Salami Khaneshan  6 , Parvaneh Ebrahimi Alavijeh  6 , Zahra Jahani  6 , Elnaz Karimian  6 , Zahra Ahmadinejad  6 , Hossein Khalili  7 , Arash Seifi  6 , Fereshteh Ghiasvand  6 , Sara Ghaderkhani  6 , Mehrnaz Rasoolinejad  6
Affiliations

Predictors of the prolonged recovery period in COVID-19 patients: a cross-sectional study

SeyedAhmad SeyedAlinaghi et al. Eur J Med Res. .

Abstract

Background: The clinical course of COVID-19 may vary significantly. The presence of comorbidities prolongs the recovery time. The recovery in patients with mild-to-moderate symptoms might take 10 days, while in those with a critical illness or immunocompromised status could take 15 days. Considering the lack of data about predictors that could affect the recovery time, we conducted this study to identify them.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was implemented in the COVID-19 clinic of a teaching and referral university hospital in Tehran. Patients with the highly suggestive symptoms who had computed tomography (CT) imaging results with typical findings of COVID-19 or positive results of reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) were enrolled in the study. Inpatient and outpatient COVID-19 participants were followed up by regular visits or phone calls, and the recovery period was recorded.

Results: A total of 478 patients were enrolled. The mean age of patients was 54.11 ± 5.65 years, and 44.2% were female. The median time to recovery was 13.5 days (IQR: 9). Although in the bivariate analysis, multiple factors, including hypertension, fever, diabetes mellitus, gender, and admission location, significantly contributed to prolonging the recovery period, in multivariate analysis, only dyspnea had a significant association with this variable (p = 0.02, the adjusted OR of 2.05; 95% CI 1.12-3.75).

Conclusion: This study supports that dyspnea is a predictor of recovery time. It seems like optimal management of the comorbidities plays the most crucial role in recovery from COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19; Comorbidities; Dyspnea; Predictors; Recovery; Time.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there is no competing interest regarding the publication of this manuscript.

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