Thanks to Fitbit, we now know survivors of COVID-19 had long-lasting health effects of the virus, including elevated heart rates that lasted months after diagnosis.
According to PEOPLE, researchers tracked the long-term health changes among hundreds who had tested positive for the virus. They found that symptoms lasted longer compared to other respiratory illnesses.
The data was collected from Fitbits and analyzed by researchers in California and Michigan. The group monitored the Fitbit data and concluded on average that survivors had elevated heart rates for 79 days or nearly three months after their initial symptoms.
Of that number, a small portion (14%) of patients continued to have a heart rate of five beats per minute above normal for over 133 days.
The study was conducted on 875 participants who all reported having symptoms related to a respiratory illness, including fever, cough, and body aches. 234 tested positive for COVID-19. The others were assumed to have some other type of infection.
The positive COVID-19 participants and the group without COVID-19 slept more, walked less, and saw their resting heart rates go up after the start of their infection, but the change in heart rates lasted far longer in the COVID-19 patients.
COVID-19 patients also underwent an unusual drop in heart rate about nine days after the start of their symptoms, before it went back up to above average and stayed there for months.
“There was a much larger change in resting heart rate for individuals who had Covid compared to other viral infections,” Dr. Jennifer Radin, an epidemiologist at Scripps who is leading the trial, told The New York Times.
Radin added that the COVID-19 patients took longer than the other group of participants to return to their normal sleep and physical activity levels.
The data and researchers suggest that this data indicates that COVID-19 impacts the automatic nervous system, which controls usual body functions like the heart.
“Lots of people who get COVID end up getting autonomic dysfunction and a kind of ongoing inflammation, and this may adversely affect their body’s ability to regulate their pulse,” Radin said.
“We want to kind of do a better job of collecting long-term symptoms so we can compare the physiological changes that we’re seeing with symptoms that participants are actually experiencing,” Radin said. “So this is really a preliminary study that opens up many other studies down the road.”
