University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications

UMMS Affiliation

Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences

Publication Date

2021-06-29

Document Type

Article Preprint

Disciplines

Bioinformatics | Computational Biology | Data Science | Diagnosis | Immunology and Infectious Disease | Infectious Disease | Microbiology | Virus Diseases

Abstract

Importance Since late 2019, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has given rise to a global pandemic and introduced many health challenges with economic, social, and political consequences. In addition to a complex acute presentation that can affect multiple organ systems, there is mounting evidence of various persistent long-term sequelae. The worldwide scientific community is characterizing a diverse range of seemingly common long-term outcomes associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, but the underlying assumptions in these studies vary widely making comparisons difficult. Numerous publications describe the clinical manifestations of post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC or “long COVID”), but they are difficult to integrate because of heterogeneous methods and the lack of a standard for denoting the many phenotypic manifestations of long COVID.

Observations We identified 303 articles published before April 29, 2021, curated 59 relevant manuscripts that described clinical manifestations in 81 cohorts of individuals three weeks or more following acute COVID-19, and mapped 287 unique clinical findings to Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms.

Conclusions and Relevance Patients and clinicians often use different terms to describe the same symptom or condition. Addressing the heterogeneous and inconsistent language used to describe the clinical manifestations of long COVID combined with the lack of standardized terminologies for long COVID will provide a necessary foundation for comparison and meta-analysis of different studies. Translating long COVID manifestations into computable HPO terms will improve the analysis, data capture, and classification of long COVID patients. If researchers, clinicians, and patients share a common language, then studies can be compared or pooled more effectively. Furthermore, mapping lay terminology to HPO for long COVID manifestations will help patients assist clinicians and researchers in creating phenotypic characterizations that are computationally accessible, which may improve the stratification and thereby diagnosis and treatment of long COVID.

Keywords

Infectious Diseases, COVID-19, long COVID, post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, PASC, clinical manifestations, phenotyping

Rights and Permissions

The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.

DOI of Published Version

10.1101/2021.06.23.21259416

Source

medRxiv 2021.06.23.21259416; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.23.21259416. Link to preprint on medRxiv

Comments

This article is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.

Full author list omitted for brevity. For the full list of authors, see article.

Related Resources

Now published in EBioMedicine doi: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2021.103722

Journal/Book/Conference Title

medRxiv

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS