Impacts of Post-COVID-19 on Common Symptoms, Functional Capacity, Pulmonary Function and Quality of Life Following 6 Months After Infection in Young Adult

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an emerging disease that impacts on global health, social and economic status. Although the majority of patients recovered from this infection, there will still be abnormalities or defects in one or many organs. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of COVID-19 infection on common symptoms, functional capacity, pulmonary function and quality of life at 4 weeks and within 6 months after infection using the cross-sectional analytic study with convenience sampling during January to April, 2023. The results among 46 young adult volunteers (9 males and 37 females) with an average age of 21.22±1.51 years showed that 86.95% had common symptoms. The top five most common symptoms were extreme fatigue, dyspnea, chronic cough, shortness of breathing, secretion retention from sputum and increased hair loss. Functional capacity assessed by a 6-minute walk test showed 79.33% of the predicted value. Pulmonary function was normal of which the mean of predicted value was higher than 80%. Moreover, the quality of life investigated by using SF-36 questionnaire revealed that the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th dimensions related to physical activity were in good and very good level. Additionally, the emotional dimension was at medium level. Thus, these results indicated that post-COVID-19 volunteers might still have common symptoms within 6 months. The functional capacity, pulmonary function and quality of life did not affected work or daily physical activity.