Women more likely to have long COVID, different symptom profile

Women are significantly more likely than men to experience long COVID, with symptoms that follow a distinct clinical pattern, researchers reported. They said more efforts are needed to explore sex differences in outcomes, including greater risks of exposure for some jobs. The researchers from the Johnson & Johnson Office of the Chief Medical Officer reported their findings in Current Medical Research and Opinion, a peer-reviewed journal. Patterns emerged for short- and longer-term sequelae The researchers examined academic papers on COVID that were published between Dec 2019 and Aug 2020, plus studies on long COVID that appeared between Jan 2020 and Jun 2021. The total sample size included 1.3 million people, but the team pointed out that only 35 of 640,634 articles provided data by sex and enough details about clinical symptoms and outcome to make a gender comparison. All of the 35 studies were conducted before COVID-19 vaccination was widely available. Only 5 of...