Pregnancy might offer women some protection from developing long COVID, a new study says.
Women infected with COVID-19 during pregnancy were 14% to 30% less likely to develop lasting symptoms from their illness, researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Communications.
“Though we observed that pregnant women have a significant risk of long COVID, it was surprisingly lower than those who were not pregnant when they had SARS-CoV-2 infection,” lead researcher Dr. Chengxi Zang, an instructor in population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, said in a news release.
For the study, researchers tapped into real-world data from two large electronic health record databases, the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) and the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C).
The databases contained records for about 72,000 women infected with COVID during pregnancy between March 2020 and June 2023. Researchers compared them to about 208,000 other women who weren’t pregnant but got COVID around the same time.
Long COVID symptoms tend to crop up weeks after a person’s initial bout with COVID-19. These symptoms can be widely varied, and can last for months or even years, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 16 of 100 pregnant women developed long COVID, compared with 19 of 100 women who weren’t pregnant, results showed.
Among pregnant women, certain groups were at greater risk for long COVID than others, researchers said.
Black women, women 35 or older, and women with obesity were more likely to develop long COVID despite being pregnant, results show. However, their risk for long COVID was still lower than that for similar women who weren’t pregnant.
“Further research on factors such as inequitable healthcare access, socioeconomic factors and structural racism may help us understand the elevated long COVID risk in these groups and find ways to protect them,” Zang said.
Pregnancy can alter the way a woman’s immune and inflammatory systems work, and this might contribute to a lower risk of long COVID, Zang said.
Thus, pregnant women might provide clues to researchers regarding how to help people avoid long COVID.
“The observed risk differences in this analysis suggest future dedicated studies of long COVID in pregnant individuals are needed,” Zang said.
Researchers also are investigating ways to protect pregnant women from long COVID using drugs already on the market.