An important study on COVID-19 by PhD student Dr Rachel Xuereb done under the supervision of Dr Caroline L. Magri and co-supervised by Prof. Stephen Fava has been recently published in the prestigious American Journal of Medicine (impact factor 5.9).

Amongst its important findings is that after medium-term follow-up post-COVID (median 173.5 days), COVID cases had a higher frequency of shortness of breath, fatigue, arthralgia, abnormal taste of food (P <.001), and anosmia than controls. Cases also exhibited worse scores in the general health and role physical domains of the Short Form Survey-36. Inflammatory markers were significantly higher in the cases, and there was a positive correlation with time, suggesting that there is ongoing systemic inflammation in patients persisting for months after COVID-19. Significant determinants of shortness of breath were age, female gender and white cell count, troponin I, and lower hemoglobin levels at follow-up.