“Cocolate”, a study coordinated by Tourcoing to understand the “long Covid”

Lille, France | AFP | Friday 04/12/2020 – Tourcoing hospital is coordinating a study on the “long Covid”, which could possibly include 1,000 patients across France, in order to try to identify the causes of persistent symptoms in some patients, a times months after the acute phase of the disease.

Titled “Cocolate,” for late covid coordination, this study is currently underway, including its first patients, explains its coordinating physician, Dr. Olivier Robineau, of CH Dron’s infectious disease department.

“The idea is that the study will gradually extend to at least 20 hospitals” and follow about 1,000 patients, he told AFP, noting that it is, to his knowledge, “the only study declared to be an attempt to recover patients across the board. territory “.

These patients, who have not had a very severe form of Covid-19 and have not been hospitalized in intensive care, will have at least one persistent symptom in common two months after the acute episode of the disease. They will be referred by their primary care physicians to hospitals, who will offer them a coordinated path to explore their symptoms and can include them in the study.

Tiredness, shortness of breath, feeling of mental slowdown, problems with concentration with the impression of being “in the fog”, headache, joint or chest pain: persistent symptoms are quite numerous but “not very specific”, underlines Dr. Robineau.

The study will have to define the symptoms that are really associated with persistent covid, which today does not have “a medical definition because we do not yet have sufficient epidemiological data”.

The hypotheses about the causes of these symptoms extend from the psychological field, with somatization linked to the stress of the epidemic, to the persistence of an inflammatory reaction, or even to the persistence of the virus.

“For the moment, we have the impression that the people they consult are rather women, but we’re not sure yet,” says Dr. Robineau,

“All we want is to be able to say that Covid, in 90% of cases, stops in less than 3 weeks a month and that in some people it will last six months or a year, but that afterwards people will be fine”, he hopes, pointing out that mononucleosis or cytomegalovirus can tire for even six months, without there being any concern for the patient.

On the same theme of long Covid, the AP-HP (Paris Hospitals) also announced on Thursday the start of the second phase of a research project, after the one that “allowed to identify 50 manifestations of these long forms) thanks to the ‘analysis of the experiences of 600 patients ”

It is now a question of “developing a questionnaire that allows to obtain a valid and reliable measure of the evolution of long COVID”, which “could be used as a monitoring tool by caregivers to adapt according to the symptoms and the impact of the disease on their life, and as an outcome measure reported by patients in future research on the disease, “the AP-HP detailed, inviting them to register on the patient community site for research compare.aphp.fr.