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• Posted December 5, 2024

Most Young People With Long COVID Recover Within 2 Years

Most children and teenagers can shake long COVID within a couple of a years, a new, reassuring study finds.

About 70% of children and teens diagnosed with long COVID recover from the disorder within 24 months of their initial infection, researchers reported Dec. 4 in the journal Nature Communications Medicine.

“Our findings show that for teenagers who fulfilled our research definition of Long COVID three months after a positive test for the COVID virus, the majority have recovered after two years,” said lead researcher Terence Stephenson, a professor with the University College London (UCL) Great Ormand Street Institute of Child Health.

Long COVID typically develops weeks or months after a person has recovered from an initial infection of COVID-19, researchers said in background notes.

People with Long COVID typically have symptoms like fatigue, sleeplessness, shortness of breath, brain fog or headaches, researchers said. These symptoms can hamper their ability to get around and perform daily activities, and they also can affect mood.

For this study, researchers analyzed data on 233 young people in England whose symptoms met the diagnostic criteria for Long COVID three months after they tested positive for COVID-19.

Two years later, 165 (70%) had recovered from Long COVID. 

“This is good news, but we intend to do further research to try to better understand why 68 teenagers had not recovered,” Stephenson said in a UCL news release.

Girls were nearly twice as likely as boys to still have Long COVID after two years, researchers found. In addition, older teenagers were less likely to have recovered from Long COVID by that benchmark. 

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about Long COVID.

SOURCE: University College London, news release, Dec. 4, 2024