Dynamics of post-COVID asthenia: review

Novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. COVID-19 is known to affect both the respiratory, digestive, excretory, and nervous systems. The incidence of chronic effects of the novel coronavirus infection is now on the rise. This paper is aimed to review the epidemiology, pathogenesis and components of post-COVID asthenia. Material and methods. Sixty-three references published between 2005 and 2023 and indexed in the PubMed, CyberLeninka, Russian Citation Index, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar databases were included in this review. Results. The study revealed the most common symptoms of post-COVID asthenia are fatigue, muscle weakness, shortness of breath, sleep disturbances, anxiety or depression, impaired memory and cognitive functions (“foggy brain”), hyposmia, and reduced work performance. One of the specific symptom complexes for post-COVID is asthenovegetative syndrome, the incidence of which according to the meta-analysis ranged from 13.1 to 72.8 %, with a cumulative percentage of 45 ± 0.05 % (95 % confidence interval 0.31–0.54). Conclusions. Nowadays, post-COVID asthenia is becoming extremely severe. It is necessary to review in detail the available data on the epidemiology and components of post-COVID asthenia in order to develop an adequate strategy for post-COVID management.

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