Analysis of the long-term effects of COVID-19 treatments and its relationship with post-COVİD syndrome

During the acute period of the Coronavirus pandemic, which was caused by acute respiratory syndrome virus-2, patients suffered from various symptoms; primarily fever and cough. Although some patients were lucky to be mildly affected by the disease, other were hospitalized due to serious infections and symptoms. It was also observed that those recovered from the disease and discharged from the hospitals suffered from similar symptoms later on, which can also be called post-COVID-19 syndrome. This study included 165 patients, including 118 COVID-19 patients and 47 pneumonia patients, who were discharged after at least one overnight stay in the related services of a public hospital between 01.09.2021 and 31.03.2022. Within the scope of the study, the drug treatments applied to the patients were examined and they were accessed through phone calls 10 months after they were discharged from the hospital and asked whether they had similar symptoms or not. The results of the study revealed that the patients diagnosed with COVID-19 suffered from the symptoms such as loss of taste or smell as well as hair loss more frequently than those diagnosed with pneumonia but suffered from shortness of breath and chest pain less frequently. Since the rest of the symptoms other than these four symptoms mentioned above did not significantly differ between the patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and pneumonia, it can be concluded that the symptoms that are thought to be the symptoms of COVID-19 are in fact due to pneumonia rather than COVID-19 disease. In addition, the study found that loss of taste or smell symptoms was likely to be observed more in the patients who used paracetamol and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs during hospital treatment and there is growing need to conduct further studies to explore and scrutinize the relationship drugs and symptoms as well.