COVID-19 can end in the hospital and still keep changing a person’s life months later. This follow-up asks whether people treated with plitidepsin remained well over the longer term. COVID-19 is not always finished when the infection ends.

It can also cause longer-term mental and physical health consequences, including fatigue, breathing trouble, chest pain, thinking problems, and joint pain. When these symptoms persist three months after infection, they are called long COVID.

Between ten and twenty-five percent of patients may experience it, with limits on daily activities and effects that can continue for more than a year. So the follow-up study asked a focused question: could plitidepsin treatment in people hospitalized with COVID-19 affect the later problems left behind by the infection?

The question is less like checking whether a storm has passed and more like returning months later to see whether the house is still damaged. The study looked at later illness and described complications in patients from APLICOV-PC who had received plitidepsin as a therapeutic intervention.

The treatment had been given through a vein for three consecutive days, at one of three daily amounts. The follow-up found no severe complications during the period after hospital discharge. Some patients were diagnosed with COVID-19 again, while a small number had individual problems such as cough, changes in blood sugar, hair loss, or lung disease.

Tiredness, described in the study as asthenia, was reported in two patients, or five point nine percent of those followed. The investigators reported no clinically relevant abnormalities in the patients’ hematological parameters, meaning the study found no clinically important blood-test abnormalities among those evaluated.

Finally, none of the patients experienced a thromboembolic event, so the study reported no blood-clot events among the patients it followed. None of the patients needed to return to the hospital for complications related to the disease.

Three patients did need extra oxygen after leaving the hospital, delivered through a nasal tube or a mask. Some patients reported low mood, headaches, or anxiety. These rates were lower than in a much larger electronic follow-up record, where mental and neurological complications appeared in thirty-four percent of people during the first six months after diagnosis.

Other reports have described mood and anxiety disorders, nerve problems, and dementia after COVID-19 in some patients during follow-up periods. They have also reported headaches and changes in thinking after the acute infection, including among patients followed beyond twelve weeks.

Taken together, the study found no severe complications, no clinically important heart-recording changes, few disease-related problems, and limited need for extra oxygen among the followed patients. The reported rate of later complications appeared to be at the low end of rates described in a recent review, although the study was small and had no untreated comparison group.

The overall conclusion was that plitidepsin had a favorable long-term safety profile in adults hospitalized with COVID-19, and that later complications were in the low range of published reports. For patients and families, that is reassuring evidence about what happened after treatment, but it is not proof that plitidepsin itself prevented long COVID.

The followed patients had few serious later complications and no disease-related readmissions, but the study had no untreated comparison group, so it cannot prove that the treatment prevented long COVID.