Women who follow correct habits to stay healthy have less risk of developing long covid: controlling weight and sleep is the most important thing.
The risk of suffering from long covid – or having the symptoms of covid for more than four weeks − is halved in women who adopt a healthy lifestyle, compared to those who neglect themselves more: this is what emerges from a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which involved nearly 2,000 nurses who contracted covid between 2020 and 2021.
I study. Exhaustion, mental fog, digestive disorders – these are just some of the annoying symptoms attributable to long covid, one of many gifts of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. To understand more, the researchers analyzed data on more than 32,000 nurses who reported their lifestyle between 2015 and 2017, looking at those who became infected between April 2020 and November 2021.
In particular, the authors took into account six factors that determine a “healthy lifestyle”: having a body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 24.7, never having smoked, drinking alcohol moderately, adopting a high-quality diet, get seven to nine hours of sleep a night and get at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a week. Among the more than 1,900 nurses who fell ill, 44% developed long covid: compared to those who did not adopt any healthy habits in their routine, those who adopted five or six had a 49% lower risk of suffering from long covid.
Control weight and sleep. In particular, the two factors most closely associated with a lower risk of long covid were getting adequate sleep and maintaining a correct BMI. The results also showed that, among women who developed long covid, those who had a healthy lifestyle even before contracting the infection had a 30% lower risk of having symptoms that interfered with their daily lives.
Changing habits. According to the authors, one of the possible explanations for the associations between lifestyle and long covid is that an unhealthy lifestyle increases the risk of chronic inflammation and immune system dysregulation – aspects often connected to long covid diagnoses. “It only takes changing a few habits, for example by starting to sleep more, to help prevent long covid,” underlines Siwen Wang, coordinator of the study.