Coronavirus harms the brain and nervous system of HALF of severely ill patients — causing symptoms such as stumbling, slurred speech and seizures, study finds
Coronavirus harms the brain and nervous system of half of severely ill patients, a study on patients with COVID-19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan has found.
Such impacts — which appear in a third of patients overall — lead to symptoms including headaches, stumbling, slurred speech, nerve pain and seizures.
The study — the first to characterise the brain problems associated with coronavirus infection — suggest that these symptoms could indicate patients at a higher risk.
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Coronavirus harms the brain and nervous system of HALF of severely ill patients, a study on patients with COVID-19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan has found (stock image)
In the study, neurologist Bo Hu of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and colleagues analysed 214 patients with COVID-19 from Wuhan, China, the city where the outbreak emerged, between mid-January and mid-February.
The patients were all treated in one of three dedicated special care centres in the university’s Union Hospital.
The experts sorted neurological symptoms into one of three categories, the first of which was central nervous system manifestations — including dizziness, headache, impaired consciousness, acute cerebrovascular disease, ataxia and seizure.
The other categories were peripheral nervous system manifestations (taste impairment, smell impairment, vision impairment and nerve pain) and skeletal muscular injury manifestations.
‘Overall, 78 patients (36.4 per cent) had neurologic manifestations,’ the researchers wrote in their paper.
‘Compared with patients with non-severe infection, patients with severe infection were older, had more underlying disorders, especially hypertension, and showed fewer typical symptoms of COVID-19, such as fever and cough,’ they added.
‘Patients with more severe infection had neurologic manifestations, such as acute cerebrovascular diseases (5 vs 1), impaired consciousness (13 vs 3) and skeletal muscle injury (17 vs 6).’
The study — the first to characterise the brain problems associated with coronavirus infection — suggest that neurological symptoms could indicate patients who are at a higher risk. Pictured, a computed tomography (CT) image of the brain of a patient with COVID-19
‘During the epidemic period of COVID-19, when seeing patients with neurologic manifestations, clinicians should suspect severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection as a differential diagnosis,’ the researchers said.
This, they added, will avoid delayed diagnosis or misdiagnosis and losing the chance to treat [the patients] and prevent further transmission.’
The full findings of the study were published in the journal JAMA Neurology.