UArizona Health Sciences gets $7.3M from CDC to study long COVID

PHOENIX — The University of Arizona Health Sciences announced earlier this month that it received $7.3 million in funding to study the impacts of long COVID-19.

The project — which was funded by the Center for Disease Control — aims to understand the long-term effects of post-COVID-19 conditions across all ages and in underserved communities, UArizona Health Sciences said in a press release.

“The University of Arizona has been at the forefront of COVID-19 research since the start of the pandemic, which leaves us well-positioned to explore answers to vitally important questions about the long-term effects of COVID-19,” University of Arizona President Robert Robbins said in the release.

“Thanks to the generous support of the CDC and our key partnerships with state agencies, we will be (able to) explore potential solutions to improving the health and well-being of people affected by long COVID, not only in Arizona, but nationally and around the world.”

The southern Arizona academic health center is one of five sites in the nation participating in the CDC’s Track PCC initiative — otherwise known as “Tracking the burden, distribution, impact of post COVID-19 conditions in diverse populations for children, adolescents and adults.”

“The overall goal of the research is to learn more about long COVID and the risk factors, so who is more likely to develop it,” Kristen Progreba told KTAR News 92.3 FM. “And then the ultimate goal, really, is to help treat and get people back to recovery.

“While our study is not a clinical trial, we work with many clinical studies and we have a lot of partners who are clinicians and the goal is really to give them the best information possible to kind of create that translational medicine pathway.”

Researchers will work to determine how many people are experiencing post-COVID-19 complications in the state by reviewing data in health care records.

“We were basically ready to go, day one when we got the grant, and because of that I think that gave us a bit of an advantage,” Progreba said.

She added that she believes a reason why Arizona was selected to participate in the study is because of its diverse population.

Participation is open and registration can be done online.

KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Heidi Hommel contributed to this story.

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