Women may be more likely than men to get long COVID

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-01-23 03:00

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US scientists say women may be more likely than men to contract long COVID, with women aged 40-55 most at risk. The team looked at health data from more than 12,000 people and found women were between 1.31 and 1.44 times as likely as men to have the condition overall. They say these findings held true across all age groups except among women aged 18 to 39 years, who had a lower risk at 1.04 times that of men. When they just looked at women who were not pregnant, women were at 1.5 times the risk of getting long COVID as men. Among menopausal women, the risk was 1.42 times that of men, and among non-menopausal women, the risk was 1.45 times that of men. The findings suggest patients' sex, age and other factors should be taken into account when assessing their risk of long COVID, the authors conclude.

Media release

From: JAMA

Sex Differences in Long COVID

About The Study: This study found that female sex was associated with an increased risk of long COVID compared with male sex, and this association was age, pregnancy, and menopausal status dependent. These findings highlight the need to identify biological mechanisms contributing to sex specificity to facilitate risk stratification, targeted drug development, and improved management of long COVID.

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Journal/
conference: JAMA Network Open

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Texas Health Science Center, USA

Funder: This research was funded by grants OTA OT2HL161841, OT2HL161847, and OT2HL156812 from the NIH as part of the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) research program. Additional support was provided by grant R01 HL162373 from the NHLBI, NIH (Drs Thaweethai and Foulkes). This project was supported in part by grant UM1TR004528 from the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Northern Ohio, which is funded by the NCATS, NIH (Drs McComsey and Singer), and KL2 TR002646 from the NIH (Dr P. Shah).

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