- Published
- 31 October 2024
- Journal article
Socio-demographic and clinical predictors of post-acute, mid-and long-term psychological sequelae of COVID-19: a two-year cross-sectional investigation on 1317 patients at the University Hospital of Verona
- Authors
- Source
- Archives of Public Health
Abstract
Background The present paper focuses on socio-demographics, clinical variables, and the distance from the infection in predicting the long-term psycho-social consequences of COVID-19. Methods Patients were screened with a cross-sectional design at the Psychological Service of the University Hospital of Verona (Italy) at 3, 6, 12, and 18 months after their SARS-CoV-2 infection. The assessment was part of the Horizon 2020-funded ORCHESTRA Project and included the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), the Short Form Health Survey 36 (SF-36), the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), and ad-hoc questions measuring pre-post COVID-19 changes on psycho-social dimensions (sleep quality, nutrition, level of autonomy, work, social relationships, emotional wellbeing). Results Between June 2021 and June 2023, we evaluated 1317 patients (mean age 56.6 ± 14.8 years; 48% male): 35% at three months, 40% at 6, 20% at 12, and 5% at 18 months after the infection. Thirty-five percent were hospitalized due to COVID-19. Overall, 16% reported some form of clinically significant mental distress following the infection (HADS-TOT), with 13% and 6%, respectively, experiencing anxiety (HADS-Anxiety) and depressive symptoms (HADS-Depression). Four percent testified post-traumatic symptoms. The SF-36 scale revealed that 16% and 17% of subjects had physical or psychological deterioration in quality of life, respectively. The regression analyses showed that females experienced higher levels of anxiety and depression compared to males, along with worse mental and physical quality of life and pre-post infection changes in nearly all the investigated psycho-social dimensions. Younger people felt more anxiety and had a reduced mental quality of life than their older counterparts, who, in turn, had poorer scores in terms of autonomy and physical functioning. Hospitalized patients had lower levels of self-sufficiency, social relationships, and work than non-hospitalized people. The latter were more anxious and reported a lower physical quality of life. Finally, patients evaluated for the first time at 12- and 18 months showed a more significant impairment in mental and physical quality of life than those assessed at three months. Conclusions Our data show that COVID-19 psychological sequelae tend to persist over time, still needing clinical attention and intervention planning, especially for females.
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modifed the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Cite as
Perlini, C., Marcanti, M., Zonta, M., Mazzi, M., Mason, A., Apollonio, M., Calì, D., Fasoli, M., Brocco, C., Nesto, S., Humphris, G., Maccarrone, G., Gentilotti, E., Tacconelli, E. & Del Piccolo, L. 2024, 'Socio-demographic and clinical predictors of post-acute, mid-and long-term psychological sequelae of COVID-19: a two-year cross-sectional investigation on 1317 patients at the University Hospital of Verona', Archives of Public Health, 82, article no: 198. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13690-024-01426-x
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- Repository URI
- https://hdl.handle.net/10023/30838