Long Covid rates could be slashed in half if people ate healthy and exercised

Maintaining healthy lifestyle habits such as regular exercise and adequate sleep can help stave off long Covid symptoms, a study suggests.

Nurses who lived healthily were nearly half as likely to still be suffering with lingering symptoms after clearing the initial infection.

A research team from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that the biggest risk factors were getting fewer than seven hours of sleep per night and a body mass index below 25. 

Long Covid is a nebulous term that doctors are still struggling to define. The condition encompasses a wide range of symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, and chest pain.

While the medical community struggles to coalesce around a single diagnosis, a growing body of scientific evidence has cast doubt on the condition’s severity, positing that the crisis is overblown.

The above shows deaths involving long Covid (green bars) and deaths from Covid (blue line). It shows that long Covid fatalities rose shortly after Covid fatalities

Long Covid is defined as residual symptoms of Covid infection that last longer than four weeks after the initial infection. 

But some symptoms that linger for weeks or months on end could indicate another underlying condition such as thyroid problems, diabetes, or vitamin deficiencies.

In the latest study, Harvard scientists set out to determine how underlying health dictates a person’s risk of lingering symptoms. 

They gathered data from more than 32,000 female nurses in the Nurses’ Health Study II, a national study that follows a group of people forward to examine lifestyle habits or other characteristics to see if they develop a disease or die.

The lifestyle habits considered included healthy body mass index, cigarette use, diet, alcohol consumption, exercise, and sleep.

The nurses reported on their lifestyles in 2015 and 2017 as well as their history of Covid infection from April 2020 to November 2021. 

In that time, more than 1,900 nurses were infected and 44 percent of them developed long Covid.

But the team also concluded that nurses who maintained five or six healthy lifestyle habits had a 49 percent decreased chance of getting long Covid.

Among the six lifestyle factors considered, maintaining a healthy weight and getting enough sleep, about seven to nine hours daily, were the ones most strongly associated with a lower risk of long Covid.

The above shows that men and women 85 years of age and older were at a much higher risk of having long Covid on their death certificates than those in younger age groups

Dr Andrea Roberts, a research scientist at Harvard and senior author of the study said: ‘With ongoing waves of Covid-19, long Covid has created a serious public health burden. Our findings raise the possibility that adopting more healthy behaviors may reduce the risk of developing long Covid.’

The team also found that even among women who developed long Covid symptoms, those who lived healthy pre-infection lives had a 30 percent lower risk of having symptoms that interfered with their daily lives.

An explanation for the link researchers established could be that an unhealthy lifestyle can exacerbate chronic inflammation and immune dysregulation problems, both of which have been associated with a higher risk of long Covid.

Their findings were published in JAMA Internal Medicine. 

Dr Siwen Wang, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard and the lead author said: ‘In the past decades, scientists have accumulated evidence that healthy lifestyle is good for overall health. However, in the U.S. for example, 70 percent of the population do not have a healthy body weight and 30 percent do not sleep enough.’

‘Findings from this study suggest that simple lifestyle changes, such as having adequate sleep, may be beneficial for the prevention of long Covid.’

A 2022 federal government report projected that roughly 23 million Americans, over seven percent of the population, have been affected by long Covid.

Some people experience symptoms so severe that their everyday lives are hindered. 

Last month, New York’s largest workers’ compensation insurer found that 18 percent of workers reported to have long Covid – almost a fifth – still had not returned to work a full year after infection.

The condition, while hard for doctors to diagnose because symptoms can look like a range of other conditions, has proven deadly in at least 3,500 cases.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in December that 3,544 people, primarily seniors 85 and older, have died of long covid. The experts, who looked at fatalities during the 30 months of the pandemic up to June 2022, suggested that higher levels of inflammation in long Covid patients have exacerbated underlying conditions in already-sick patients, raising the risk of death.