Covid 19 Shows Signs Of Neurological Problem

According to an interim analysis from the Global Consortium Study of Neurologic Dysfunction in Covid 19 many patients affected by Covid 19 are diagnosed with neurological symptoms which are six times more likely to die in the hospital than those without the neurological complications. A paper published in JAMA Network.

This paper shows the early results of the global effort to collect information about the incidence, severity, and outcomes of neurological manifestations of Covid 19 disease. Sherry Chou, M.D., M.Sc., lead author principal investigator of the consortium and associate professor of critical care medicine, neurology, and neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC said that at an early stage on the pandemic, it became evident that many people who were sick enough to be hospitalized also developed neurological problems. A year later people are fighting an unknown invisible enemy and, like in any battle, researchers need to learn as much as we can about the neurological impacts of  in patients who are actively sick and in survivors.

The GCS-Neuro Covid 19 is the largest cohort study of neurological manifestations of  to date, spanning 133 adult patient sites in all continents except Antarctica. Among one group of 3,744 hospitalized adult patients with coronavirus , 82% had self-reported or clinically captured neurological symptoms. Totally 4 out of 10 patients reported having headaches, and approximately 3 out of 10 said they lost their sense of smell or taste. Many clinically diagnosed syndromes abnormalities that a bedside clinician can observe, regardless of whether the patient is aware of the problem like acute encephalopathy, were most common, affecting nearly half of the patients, followed by coma and strokes.

Despite early interests in the coronavirus’s capacity to attack the brain and cause brain swelling and inflammation like meningitis and encephalitis, those events were very rare, occurring in less than 1% of hospitalized coronavirus patients.

The researchers analyzed data from three different types of patient cohorts the all Covid 19 cohort, which included all 3,055 hospitalized patients with coronavirus, irrespective of their neurological status; the neurological cohort, which included 475 hospitalized coronavirus patients with clinically confirmed neurological symptoms compiled by the GCS-Neuro Covid 19 Consortium. The ENERGY cohort, or 214 hospitalized coronavirus patients who expected examination by a consulting neurologist and provided consent to join in the European Academy of Neurology Neuro- Covid 19 Registry, a formal partner of the GCS-Neuro Covid 19 Consortium.