Identifying clusters of COVID-19 and Long Covid symptoms
We would like to understand if symptoms of COVID-19 and Long COVID group together. We want to answer questions like “does having COVID-19 with a cough make it more likely that you will lose your sense of smell?” We will do this by combining data from 15 studies into one large dataset. The dataset will have information about when a person had COVID-19 and what symptoms they had. It will also include age, sex and ethnicity. We will group people according to their symptoms and to find out if age, sex, ethnicity or time since COVID infection makes a person more likely to have a group of symptoms. Other researchers have done a similar project in 9 of the 15 studies separately. They found two groups of symptoms. We will replicate their analysis to confirm these findings, and then expand it to all 15 studies. If some symptom groups are less common, by combining data from 15 studies into one dataset, we are more likely to identify them. Knowing which symptoms group together may help doctors to diagnose Long COVID and improve the quality of life of people that have it.
Charlotte James charlotte.james@bristol.ac.uk