New York Times The study, which examined patients infected early in the pandemic, found they were significantly more likely than people who didn’t get Covid to experience lingering reflux, constipation and other issues.
Stomach pain, constipation, diarrhea, vomiting, bloating — these are symptoms frequently reported by people with long Covid.
Now, a large new study reports that Covid patients were significantly more likely to experience gastrointestinal problems a year after infection than people who were not infected.
The study, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, compared medical records of 154,068 Covid patients in the Veterans Health Administration system with about 5.6 million patients of similar age and other characteristics who had not contracted the coronavirus. Covid patients were 36 percent more likely to have long-term gastrointestinal problems that they did not have before their infection, with 9,605 of them experiencing issues affecting the digestive system, intestines, pancreas or liver.
The most common diagnoses were acid-related disorders, like gastroesophageal reflux disease (known as GERD) and peptic ulcer disease, which were identified in more than 2,600 patients. “There seems to be some dysregulation that points to a major imbalance in acid production,” said the senior author of the study, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
Serious inflammatory illnesses — like acute pancreatitis and cholangitis, which is inflammation of the bile duct system — affected a much smaller percentage of patients, but they were nonetheless more common among those who had Covid than those who did not.
“With all of these disorders there is an increased odds ratio, meaning that the people who had Covid and survived for 30 days or longer were more at risk of each of these categories,” said Dr. Saurabh Mehandru, a professor of gastroenterology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York who was not involved in the study.
Long Covid patients were also at higher risk of gastrointestinal symptoms, the most common being constipation, abdominal pain and diarrhea.