BERLIN, GERMANY – JANUARY 19: Ricarda Piepenhagen, an activist suffering from prolonged Covid symptoms … [+]
Women are at greater risk of developing long-term Covid than men. However, men are more likely to suffer severe infections from Covid-19 and have higher mortality rates, according to new GLASS study. More specifically, women are 1.31 times more likely to have prolonged Covid than their male counterparts.
“A review of the literature combined with our data suggests that differences in hormone levels may partially explain the higher prevalence of long-term Covid in women under 55 years of age. A reduction in the hazard ratio for long-term Covid for women aged 18 to 39 may be explained by more pregnant people in this age group,” the authors explained in the study.
“Our data align with published data on postviral myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and fibromyalgia, which are female-predominant disorders with known alterations in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis,” they added. “Multiple studies have shown that chronic conditions, such as autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis, ME/CFS and Alzheimer’s disease, are more prevalent in women compared to men.”
Globally, more than 700 million people have been infected with the coronavirus since late 2019, and by early 2025, this has resulted in at least seven million deaths. According to the Lancetby March 2023, more than 65 million people had been diagnosed with long-term Covid. However, several experts argue that long-term Covid is still underdiagnosed among the masses.
A survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that almost twice as many women have prolonged Covid with almost 7% reporting prolonged Covid symptoms, compared to 4% of men. A Study 2021 also revealed that a higher risk of long-term Covid was associated with being female, along with other risk factors such as smoking and older age. Another study findings claimed that men with a college education had the lowest prevalence of long-term Covid, but women without a college education reported the highest prevalence.
To delve into how gender could potentially affect people’s long-term Covid risks, the researchers studied the data of more than 12,000 adults who had tested positive for Covid-19. Of these, 73% were women. They observed that women from the Omicron and pre-Omicron groups had a significantly higher risk of long-term Covid than men.
“The clinical and public health implications of gender differences in long-term Covid risk, especially based on age, pregnancy and menopausal status, are significant. “It is important to disentangle the role of aging, hormones, inflammatory response, and comorbidities underlying these differential long-term COVID risk profiles and to determine which groups may benefit from specific treatments,” the researchers concluded.
“Sex-steroid-based therapies may be recommended for the mitigation of long-term symptoms of COVID-19 in women, as has already been suggested for acute COVID-19 in men,” they pointed out in the study. “Based on the findings of this study, we believe that the sex-based difference in long-term disease burden due to long-term disease may increase in addition to existing post-viral sequelae, for example, Epstein-Barr virus, ME/CFS, chronic Lyme disease, after the Ebola syndrome.
