Trajectories of Physical Disabilities Over 6 Months in Patients With Long COVID
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IMPORTANCE: Understanding the long-term impact of long COVID on physical function and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is essential to guide clinical care and rehabilitation. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to compare physical capacity over time among adults in 3 groups: those without COVID-19 (control group [CG]), those who recovered from COVID without persistent symptoms (short COVID group [SCG]), and those with long COVID (long COVID group [LCG]). A secondary objective was to identify baseline predictors of 6-month HRQoL in the LCG. DESIGN: This study was a prospective longitudinal cohort study. SETTING: In-laboratory assessments were conducted at baseline, 3 months, and 6 months, at either the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation and Social Integration (Quebec City) or the Orthopedic Clinical Research Unit (Montreal). PARTICIPANTS: A total of 360 age- and sex-matched adults (n = 120 per group), including individuals without a history of COVID-19 (CG), those with short COVID (symptom resolution within 4 weeks, SCG), and those with persistent symptoms ≥12 weeks (LCG) participated in the study. INTERVENTION/EXPOSURE: Participants were categorized based on their COVID-19 history and symptom duration and no intervention or exposure was applied. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Self-reported outcomes measuring HRQoL, comorbidities, sleep quality, pain, and fatigue, along with objective measures such as grip strength, Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB), 6-min walk test (6MWT), and perceived exertion (Modified Borg Scale) during the 6MWT, were collected. Daily averages for resting heart rate, step count, and minutes of intensive activity were recorded over 7 days using a fitness tracker watch. Generalized estimating equations were used for longitudinal comparisons, and recursive partitioning analysis for predicting HRQoL factors. RESULTS: Significant time × group interactions were observed for HRQoL, sleep quality, pain, fatigue, SPPB, and 6MWT. Although the LCG showed significant improvements across these outcomes, only the reduction in fatigue reached a clinically meaningful level, whereas the other groups remained stable. A group effect was detected for all outcomes, except for heart rate and minutes of intensive activity, with the LCG consistently showing lower scores across all follow-ups. Recursive partitioning analysis identified 2 baseline predictors of HRQoL at 6 months in the LCG: self-reported fatigue and daily step count. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: These findings highlight the persistent impairments in adults with long COVID and emphasize early HRQoL predictor identification to anticipate long-term needs and adjust treatment plans accordingly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".