By Ethan Covey
Women are significantly more likely to develop long COVID than men, with middle-aged women being at the highest risk, according to findings from a recently released study.
The study focused on data from the RECOVER (Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery) project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, which is researching the long-term effects of COVID-19. RECOVER consists of a cohort of U.S. adults from 83 sites in 33 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico (JAMA Netw Open 2025;8[1]:e2455430).
Among 12,276 participants who had experienced COVID-19 infection, significantly more women than men had long COVID at the analysis visit (21% vs. 16%). Overall, women had a risk ratio of 1.31 compared with men, corresponding to a 31% higher associated risk of developing long COVID. In the primary analysis model, which focused only on age, race and ethnicity, women had a higher risk ratio of 1.44. Women aged 40 to 55 years had the highest propensity for developing long COVID.
“These findings show that patients and healthcare teams should consider the differences in long COVID risk as it relates to sex assigned at birth,” said Dimpy Shah, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of population health sciences at the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “Understanding these differences can help us recognize and treat patients with long COVID more effectively.
“This study gives us new knowledge and builds on other studies that also looked at sex assigned at birth and long COVID,” Dr. Shah added. “Because of the size of the RECOVER study and the diversity of participants, we had a special opportunity to look at sex assigned at birth while also considering things like vaccination status, autoimmune disease, diabetes, BMI [body mass index] and COVID variant.”
Dr. Shah and her colleagues hope that the findings of the study will promote more research of how sex may affect people’s risk of developing long COVID.
“We hope this encourages other researchers to explore why there are differences in the risk of developing long COVID based on your assigned sex at birth,” she said.
The sources reported no relevant financial disclosures.
