About 6 in 10 adults in the United States are chronically ill with conditions including heart disease, diabetes or chronic lung disease. These are not diagnoses that anyone wants to get, but decades of research have provided a wealth of information on disease mechanisms, treatments and prevention.
But for the nearly 7 percent of U.S. adults who are currently experiencing long COVID, trying to figure out what’s causing their debilitating symptoms and what treatments might help is a struggle. Long COVID was first identified in 2020 during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years on, researchers have made progress in understanding that it’s a complex syndrome.