Patterns in the relationship between acute COVID-19/long COVID-19 and quality of life:A cross-sectional study of patients attending a tertiary care hospital in Turkey

Objective:To determine the change in the quality of life(QoL)of patients who applied to a tertiary outpatient clinic according to their COVID-19 status.Methods:This cross-sectional study comprised 1370 participants.Short form-12(SF-12),which includes Physical Component Summary(PCS)and Mental Component Summary(MCS)domains,was used to evaluate the QoL.Different linear regression models created using PCS-12 and MCS-12 were dependent variables.Results:A total of 19.2% of participants had acute COVID-19,and 8.4%had long COVID-19.The most common sypmtoms were fatigue(72.6%),headache(42.5%),and joint pain(39.8%)in patients with long COVID-19.The model including all participants showed that long COVID-19 reduced the QoL in multivariate analysis for both MCS and PCS,while acute COVID-19 had no significant effect on the QoL comparing with those without COVID-19.Model that included participants with COVID-19 showed that long COVID-19 negatively affected the QoL in the multivariate model for PCS-12 and MCS-12.Variables that were significant in the multivariate model for those who had long COVID-19 were having a chronic disease and presence of ongoing symptoms.Females were disadvantaged for PCS-12 and MCS-12 in the multivariate models including all participants,and models including participants who have had COVID-19.Low educational group were disadvantaged for PCS-12 in the multivariate model including all participants.This group were also disadvantaged for PCS-12 and MCS-12 in the multivariate models including participants who had COVID-19.Conclusions:In studies,acute COVID-19 and long COVID-19 should be treated as separate categories.The effects of long COVID-19 should be considered when providing and planning health services.The effect of gender,and education,on QoL shows that health inequalities continue to be effective during the pandemic period.