Adults with joints that can move beyond normal limits are more likely to not fully recover from coronavirus infection.
- Adults with joint hypermobility have joints that are capable of moving beyond normal limits.
- They are 30% more likely to not fully recover from coronavirus infection than people whose joints were normal.
- Additionally, these patients are more likely to experience persistent fatigue associated with long Covid.
Knees, shoulders, wrists, fingers, hips… When people have joints that move easily beyond the normal range of motion, this indicates that they have joint hypermobility. It is a common disease especially among women and young adults. According to researchers from King’s College London (England), adults suffering from this pathology could be exposed to an increased risk of long Covid. To reach this conclusion, they carried out a study published in the journal BMJ Public Health.
As part of this work, the scientists started from an observation. “Besides age, the likelihood of developing a long form of the coronavirus appears to be higher when linked to certain underlying health conditions, including fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine, allergies, l anxiety, depression and back pain.” These risk factors have all been independently associated with joint hypermobility. Thus, the team recruited 3,063 patients who all reported at least one Covid-19 infection. In August 2022, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire to find out whether they had hypermobile joints, whether they had fully recovered from their coronavirus infection, and whether they suffered from persistent fatigue.
Joint hypermobility: patients are 30% more likely to not recover from a Covid-19 infection
The results showed that around 1 in 3 patients reported not having fully recovered from their last infection. Among them, 269 adults presented generalized joint hypermobility. According to the authors, among the 1,940 people who reported having fully recovered, nearly one in four volunteers had joint hypermobility. “400 of them were women.” After taking into account potentially influential factors, such as age, gender, ethnicity, education level and number of vaccinations received, the team found that joint hypermobility was strongly associated with lack of complete recovery from a Covid-19 infection.
So, people with joint hypermobility were about 30% more likely to say they had not fully recovered from coronavirus infection than those with normal joints. Additionally, joint hypermobility significantly predicted high levels of fatigue, which was found to be a key factor in failure to fully recover.
“Better knowledge of joint hypermobility is necessary for effective patient care”
“This observation is clinically important because of its potential impact on the understanding and identification of long Covid subphenotypes for screening and personalized targeted interventions. More generally, better knowledge of generalized joint hypermobility and its associated extra-articular associations are necessary for effective patient care”, the researchers concluded.