Rebecca Nightingale

Project title: Amongst breathless patients referred to a “long COVID” clinic in Liverpool, what proportion have abnormalities of gas transfer in the lungs? How does the severity of ongoing symptoms relate to the degree of gas transfer abnormality? And can dynamic x-Ray detect the gas transfer abnormality?

Rebecca studied breathless patients referred to a “long COVID” clinic in Liverpool. She looked at how many had gas transfer in their lungs, if ongoing symptoms related to gas transfer abnormality, and whether a dynamic X-ray detected gas transfer abnormalities. Long Covid potentially affects 35% of people who have had COVID-19 disease. Many people experience symptoms of being short of breath or having a high heart rate even at rest. It is not fully understood why this is. Rebecca’s study uses breathing tests to assess how well oxygen gets from the lungs into the blood stream, in people with long COVID and without. It aims to find out whether symptom severity is linked to the results of the breathing test, and to explore if a modern type of chest X-ray (dynamic X-ray) can help diagnose why patients are breathless.