Which COVID-19 Symptom Shows Up First?
Researchers at the University of Southern California have discovered the possible order in which symptoms of COVID-19 first show up. They said that such an order includes fever, cough, muscle pain, and then nausea and/or vomiting, and diarrhea.
Also, according to the scientists, knowing the order of symptoms of this fatal infectious disease may help benefit seek care quickly or decide abruptly to do self-isolation.
Lead researcher Joseph Larsen, a doctoral candidate, also indicated that having knowledge of the said order may also help healthcare providers rule out other diseases.
The research team said that identifying the order of COVID-19 symptoms could also help doctors plan how to provide patients with appropriate treatments, and possibly interfere earlier in the illness.
Collaborating with Larsen in this research work are his colleagues, with James Hicks and Peter Kuhn, faculty advisors at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience's Convergent Science Institute Center.
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The Vitality of Knowing the Order of Symptoms
Such an order is particularly essential, said Kuhn, also a medicine professor at the USC. He said that it is essential to know when we have overlapping cycles of diseases such as the flu, coinciding with COVID-19 infections.
Kuhn, a biomedical engineer and aerospace and mechanical engineering professor at the said university also said doctors can identify certain steps to care for the patient, and they may avert the condition of a patient from getting worse.
Meanwhile, according to Larsen, given that there are better strategies at present, in terms of COVID-19 treatment, identifying patients the earliest possible time, could lessen the hospital confinement time.
The authors indicated fever and cough as often linked to various respiratory conditions such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS.
However, the scientists continued, the timing and symptoms in the upper and lower gastrointestinal tract set COVID-19 infection apart from other infections.
The researchers explained that the upper GI linked to vomiting or nausea, appears to be affected before the occurrence of lower GI tract symptoms like diarrhea in COVID-19, which is the contradictory from both SARS and MERS conditions.
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Scientists Forecast the Order
Scientists forecasted that the order of COVID-19 symptoms this spring from the rates of symptom occurrence of over 55,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in China, all of which were collected by the World Health Organization on the dates between February 16 and 24.
The researchers also reviewed a dataset of more than 1,000 COVID-19 cases collected by the Chinese Medical Treatment Expert Group from December 2019 until January 2020 via the National Health Commission of China.
For the comparison of the order of symptoms of COVID-19 with influenza, the scientists said they reviewed data from over 2,400 COVID-19 cases in North America, Europe, and the Southern Hemisphere, from which the health authorities received the said reports from 1994 through 1998.
The research findings were released on Thursday in the Frontiers in Public Health journal. Knowing that every disease develops different means, the study authors said that doctors can already determine sooner if someone has COVID-19 or another disease, which can help them come up with more effective treatments.
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