A living systematic review & network meta-analysis of interventions for post COVID-19 condition

The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented global health crisis, affecting millions worldwide and causing significant health and economic consequences. While many recover from COVID-19, up to 15% of survivors experience long-term effects, including fatigue, pain, and impaired cognitive function-termed long covid. Considerable resources have been made available to understanding long covid. Several trials have recently been published and hundreds more are planned or ongoing. We anticipate many trials addressing the effectiveness of interventions for long covid to be published in the next several years. These trials, however, will be published faster than evidence users, like physicians, can read them and make sense of them and will come with strengths and limitations that may not be immediately apparent. To address this, we propose to create and maintain a rigorous living systematic review over three years to provide trustworthy summaries of evidence addressing interventions for the management of long covid. Unlike a traditional review that is only up-to-date at a single point in time, we will update this review as new evidence emerges. Simple language summaries for patients and healthcare providers will accompany each iteration of the living review to further facilitate the dissemination of our findings. Our review will also inform parallel guidelines from professional associations and authoritative organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), whom we have engaged as Knowledge Users. To facilitate knowledge translation, whenever our review identifies evidence that may change practice, we will work with parallel guideline development groups to formulate recommendations that reflect the latest evidence. We will make our review and parallel guideline recommendations available to clinicians, patients, and health systems globally to optimize patient care.