"We found that nearly one in three patients had an excess burden of multiorgan abnormalities on MRI relative to controls," said Dr Betty Raman, University of Oxford’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine.
The findings come from a multi-centre MRI follow-up study of 500 post-hospitalised Covid patients. The paper presents the results of an interim analysis of 259 post-hospitalised Covid-19 patients and 52 controls.
The participants, who were recruited across 13 sites in the UK, underwent MRI scans covering the heart, brain, lungs, liver and kidneys an average of five months after discharge from hospital. They also had blood tests and completed questionnaires.
The study found that while some organ-specific symptoms correlated with the imaging evidence of organ injury -- for example, chest tightness and cough with lung MRI abnormalities -- not all symptoms could be directly linked to MRI-detected anomalies.
