Sinais e sintomas persistentes pós-COVID-19 em pessoas idosas

Abstract

COVID-19, a disease that spread rapidly around the world, proved to be an important public health problem, affecting all age groups, but with a higher incidence in adults and a fatality rate recorded in people over 60 years of age. After four years of this pandemic, we are still dealing with the consequences of this infection, with the so-called long COVID, characterized by signs and symptoms that tend to persist for months after the initial Covid infection. The present research aimed to investigate the post-COVID-19 signs and symptoms of elderly people treated in two Basic Family Health Units. The cross-sectional, descriptive study with a quantitative approach was carried out with elderly residents and registered in two Basic Family Health Units in the municipality of Pontal do Araguaia-MT, which had COVID-19 registered and confirmed. Home visits were carried out and a semi-structured questionnaire filled out in the Google Forms application was applied to analyze the data. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences® (SPSS) software version 26 was used and a significance level (⍺) of 0.05 was considered (5%). The sample consisted of 35 elderly people, predominantly female and aged 60-74 years. Among the elderly, 37.1% had Arterial Hypertension as a pre-existing comorbidity and 51.4% had not taken any dose of the vaccine against the disease, and 77.1% of them had prolonged signs and symptoms of the disease. The most prevalent signs and symptoms were memory loss with 57.1%, anxiety in 48.6% and insomnia in 48.6%. It is concluded that the majority of elderly people presented persistent signs and symptoms after acute Covid-19 infection, making it extremely important to monitor and monitor these elderly people in health services.