The Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute is receiving $9 million from the Centers for Disease Control to study COVID-19 patients whose symptoms last longer than four weeks, also known as long COVID. Dr. Shaun Grannis, vice president of data and analytics at Regenstrief, hopes this grant will cast light on a poorly understood condition.
For most people, COVID-19 symptoms last one to two weeks; other survivors continue to experience symptoms months or years after testing negative for the virus.
“We don’t know a lot right now about the long-term impacts of COVID. Obviously, it’s been just about two and a half years since it emerged,” Grannis said. “In order to care for and ensure the health of people who’ve had COVID, we want to understand those long-term effects in greater detail.”
The research will look at two unique data sets to inform its search for answers. The first is anonymized patient data gathered from Indiana’s massive health database, the Indiana Network for Patient Care. With access to this patient information, researchers can identify trends that may make certain populations more vulnerable to long COVID.
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The second is a group of child, adolescent, and adult participants who have survived the disease. Grannis said the institute plans to follow those survivors for years to see how individual health changes.
“We know that cardiovascular disease, neurological disease, they still occur without COVID and so we want to tease out and better understand what specific factors predispose people to developing these conditions above and beyond what we’d ordinarily expect,” Grannis said.
Data from the CDC show that nearly 20 percent of COVID survivors in America are still experiencing long COVID symptoms.
