U-M opens clinics for adults, kids with COVID-19 long-haul problems
COVID-19 started as a headache for 14-year-old Madison Foor of Dundee, and then developed into shortness of breath that just didn’t go away weeks after she should have recovered.
Her mother, Mariha Foor, knew something wasn’t right. Her active and fit daughter, a dancer who competes in tap, ballet and jazz, couldn’t walk up the stairs without getting winded.
Madison’s doctors referred her to specialists at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan, who recognized that the eighth grader is among the thousands of Americans who’ve contracted the virus and don’t fully recover.
Madison and others like her have a post-COVID-19 syndrome known as long COVID-19.
They continue to have sometimes debilitating symptoms that can span virtually any organ system in the body — from pulmonary to cardiovascular, gastrointestinal to neurological — and have also been associated with mental health changes ranging from mood problems to anxiety and depression.
And though the condition is most well known among adults, kids aren’t immune to it. Already, Michigan Medicine has treated more than a dozen cases of children and teens with persistent COVID symptoms like Madison’s.
Even people who have relatively mild coronavirus cases initially can later develop these ongoing chronic aftereffects. That’s why Michigan Medicine is launching two new clinics aimed at treating and studying the little-understood long COVID-19 symptoms in adults and children.
“The whole idea was to help patients to overcome these longer-term consequences of COVID … when it became apparent that patients who had COVID do not necessarily recover completely,” said Dr. Rodica Pop-Busui, director of the new Multidisciplinary Post COVID-19 Clinic for adults at U-M.
More:Inside a Michigan COVID-19 ward: Younger patients, familiar sadness and politics
More:Months after COVID-19, many with long-term symptoms wonder if they’ll ever feel the same
“Initially, we were thinking, like others, that this seems to be associated mainly with severe forms that require hospital admissions. But then later we and others observed that that’s not necessarily the case. Even people who had the milder form of disease and have never been admitted (to the hospital) start to develop a lot these symptoms, such as pain and fatigue and inability to concentrate, and more.”
The work will be partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, Pop-Busui said, and will help doctors better understand why some people go on to develop long COVID-19 and others do not.
“We are very interested in patients who had some preexisting conditions,” she said, “such as diabetes and obesity and chronic kidney disease. … The mechanism that seemed to explain why some people develop these longer-term consequences are also very much in line with the reason that people with diabetes, for instance, develop complications in the kidney, the cardiovascular system, the nervous system and so forth.”
It’s unclear exactly how prevalent long COVID-19 is among adults.
One new study suggests that six months after contracting the virus, as many as 20% to 30% of people had ongoing complications, according to research published April 22 in the journal Nature that examined the outcomes of nearly 90,000 COVID-19 patients in the health care databases of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
If that statistic holds true, it means roughly 170,000 to 250,000 people in Michigan alone could be suffering from long COVID symptoms, given that state health department data shows more than 840,000 Michiganders have been infected with the virus.
“We want to provide people with the best care, but we also want to learn what’s driving these (cases), so we can be prepared and prevent them if we can,” said Pop-Busui, who also is a professor of diabetes at the University of Michigan and the vice chair of clinical research in the department of internal medicine.
The adult clinic opened Friday and offers both virtual and in-person appointments at Domino’s Farms in Ann Arbor.
Initially, the aim will be to enroll people who were hospitalized for COVID-19. Eligible clinic patients must:
- Be 18 years and older with a history of lab-confirmed COVID-19.
- Be referred by a primary care provider or inpatient provider at discharge.
- Have an underlying health condition such as diabetes, prediabetes, obesity, thyroid or adrenal diagnosis with continuation of symptoms post COVID-19, including fatigue, shortness of breath, joint and muscle pain, weakness, dizziness, chest pain and memory problems.
However, Pop-Busui, said the clinic could expand if there’s a high demand to include people who weren’t hospitalized as well.
“We have to start somewhere,” she said. “It’s a good beginning. And if we need to expand, if the need is there, … we will be happy to do so.”
More:Salvation Army van brings food and vaccines to the streets of Detroit
More:Michigan was warned about British COVID-19 variant, but many…
Read More: U-M opens clinics for adults, kids with COVID-19 long-haul problems