New research shows that many COVID survivors will be spared long-term respiratory damage.
Scientists looked at COVID-19 survivors who had asymptomatic, moderate or severe COVID-19 infections and also underwent unrelated elective lung operations (for example, to treat lung nodules or lung cancer) at some point after they recovered from COVID-19.
In all of the patients, benign lung tissue from around the nodules or tumors showed no detectable lasting lung damage that was directly linked to COVID-19.
“Since the start of the pandemic, a big question has been whether COVID-19 will have long-term or permanent damage on our lungs,” said senior study author Dr. Zaid Abdelsattar, a thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon at Loyola Medicine, in Maywood, Ill.
“This research provided us with the rare opportunity to study the asymptomatic survivors of COVID-19 and make observations to help us answer this question,” he said in a Loyola news release.
