The initial symptoms of COVID-19 infection differ between age groups and between men and women. That's according to the latest research. This difference is most pronounced among the age group of 16 to 59 years compared to the age group of 60 to 80 years and above.
The study, published in The Lancet Digital Health and led by researchers from King’s College London, analyzed data from the ZOE COVID Symptom Study app from 20 April to 15 October 2020.
Contributors of this app are invited for further testing once they report any new symptoms. The researchers then modeled the early signs of COVID-19 infection and successfully detected 80% of cases when using self-reported symptom data over three days.
The researchers compared the ability to predict the early signs of COVID-19 infection using UK National Health Service diagnostic criteria and the Gaussian Hierarchical Process model, a type of machine learning.
This machine learning model was able to incorporate several characteristics about an infected person, such as age, gender, and health condition, and showed that the early symptoms of COVID-19 infection differed between groups.
A total of 18 symptoms were examined, and these symptoms had different relevance for early detection in different groups. The most important symptoms for early detection of COVID-19 as a whole include loss of smell (anosmia), chest pain, persistent cough, abdominal pain, blisters in the legs, eye pain, and unusual muscle pain.
However, the symptoms of olfactory loss were less pronounced in people older than 60 years and were not related to subjects older than 80 years. Other early symptoms, such as diarrhea, are more common in the older age group (60-79 and> 80). Fever, although a common symptom of the disease, is not considered an early feature of the disease in any age group.
Men were more likely to report shortness of breath, fatigue, chills and chills, while women were more likely to report loss of smell, chest pain and persistent cough.
Although this model is applied to the first strain of the virus and the Alpha variant, the main findings suggest that the symptoms of the Delta variant and subsequent variants will also differ between population groups.
"It's important for people to know that early symptoms are very broad, and may look different for each family member or household. Test guidelines can be updated to allow case determination, especially in the face of highly contagious new variants," said study leader Claire Steves from King's College London, quoted from Science Daily, Wednesday (4/8/2021).
"Currently, in the UK, only a handful of symptoms are used to recommend isolation and further testing. By using more symptoms and only after a few days of being unwell, and using AI, we can detect COVID-19 positive cases better .We hope such a method is used to encourage more people to be tested as early as possible to minimize the risk of spread, "added study lead author Dr Liane dos Santos Canas of King's College London.
Dr Marc Modat, Senior Lecturer at King’s College London added: “Our research has identified that the symptom profile of COVID-19 varies from group to group.
"This suggests that criteria for encouraging people to be tested should be personalized using individual information such as age. Alternatively, a larger set of symptoms can be considered, so that different disease manifestations from different groups are considered."
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