Symptoms of Long COVID Could Affect Patients With HIV More

Annie Antar, MD, PhD, Johns Hopkins Medicine, spoke about how the likelihood of long COVID symptoms was increased in patients living with HIV.

Transcript

How does long COVID affect health outcomes in patients with HIV compared with those without?

One of the cohorts that I've led has included people, and we've enriched for people, living with HIV specifically because we are interested in how long COVID might be different in people living with HIV. So to be clear, the abstract that we talked about at the beginning, it was open to anyone, irrespective of HIV status. We didn't try to find people with HIV. All the studies I mentioned before looking at kind of viral clearance and long COVID, again, they didn't exclude people with HIV, but they didn't look for people with HIV. That was kind of an American community sample. We have another cohort that hopefully we'll be publishing on this year, and we looked at a lot of different things [including] what percentage of people end up having long COVID. When it comes to like people who report that they have long COVID, we had about similar percentages of people in our own cohort, even though the cohort of people with HIV was more heavily male, which is a group that tends to report long COVID less, than the control HIV negative cohort, which was mostly female. Our HIV cohort also had more comorbidities than our HIV-negative cohort, yet they had the same amount of reported long COVID. I think this fits in with other data that has come out. There's a paper from some data scientists out of the University of South Carolina and then there was a paper in eClinical Medicine, both of these published in the last 8 months or so, these were meta analyses of other studies showing that the odds ratio of having long COVID in people living with HIV is probably higher than people without HIV, with an odds ratio somewhere between like 1.2 and 2. There was a nice study also Grace McComsey, last author, that did a nice electronic medical record study and also showed that people are more likely to report symptoms at 12 months in people with HIV than people without, even when you control for things like smoking status and comorbidities and age and sex and things like that. I think all the data is pointing towards people living with HIV having a higher rate of getting long COVID. We looked in detail about the symptoms. When you when you do complain of symptoms like far out, the symptoms are pretty similar. There's some that seem to be different in people with HIV. Things like constant thirst and respiratory seem to be a little bit higher in people with HIV than not. What we're going to publish on is what's different about their biomarkers, their cytokines and their immune cell percentages and things like that.