Patterns in the relationship between acute COVID-19/long COVID-19 and quality of life: A cross-sectional study of patients attending a tertiary care hospital in Turkey

Abstract

Objective: To determine the change in the quality of life (QoL) of patients who applied to a tertiary outpatient clinic according to their COVID-19 status. Methods: This cross-sectional study comprised 1 370 participants. Short form-12 (SF-12), which includes Physical Component Summary (PCS) and Mental Component Summary (MCS) domains, was used to evaluate the QoL. Different linear regression models created using PCS-12 and MCS-12 were dependent variables. Results: A total of 19.2% of participants had acute COVID-19, and 8.4% had long COVID-19. The most common sypmtoms were fatigue (72.6%), headache (42.5%), and joint pain (39.8%) in patients with long COVID-19. The model including all participants showed that long COVID-19 reduced the QoL in multivariate analysis for both MCS and PCS, while acute COVID-19 had no significant effect on the QoL comparing with those without COVID-19. Model that included participants with COVID-19 showed that long COVID-19 negatively affected the QoL in the multivariate model for PCS-12 and MCS-12. Variables that were significant in the multivariate model for those who had long COVID-19 were having a chronic disease and presence of ongoing symptoms. Females were disadvantaged for PCS-12 and MCS-12 in the multivariate models including all participants, and models including participants who have had COVID-19. Low educational group were disadvantaged for PCS-12 in the multivariate model including all participants. This group were also disadvantaged for PCS-12 and MCS-12 in the multivariate models including participants who had COVID-19. Conclusions: In studies, acute COVID-19 and long COVID-19 should be treated as separate categories. The effects of long COVID-19 should be considered when providing and planning health services. The effect of gender, and education, on QoL shows that health inequalities continue to be effective during the pandemic period.