Neurologic Symptoms Persistent for Many COVID-19 ‘Long-Haulers’

FRIDAY, March 26, 2021 (HealthDay News) — For COVID-19 long-haulers, neurologic symptoms are common, with 81 percent experiencing brain fog and 85 percent with fatigue, according to a study published online March 23 in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.

Edith L. Graham, M.D., from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues conducted a prospective study of the first 100 consecutive patients (50 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2] positive and 50 negative) presenting to a Neuro-COVID-19 clinic between May and November 2020. Patients met the Infectious Diseases Society of America symptoms of COVID-19, were not hospitalized, and had neurologic symptoms lasting for more than six weeks. The frequency of neurologic symptoms was recorded, and patient-reported quality-of-life measures and standardized cognitive assessments were analyzed.

The researchers found that depression/anxiety and autoimmune disease were the most frequent comorbidities (42 and 16 percent, respectively). Brain fog, headache, numbness/tingling, dysgeusia, anosmia, and myalgias were the main neurologic manifestations (81, 68, 60, 59, 55, and 55 percent, respectively); only anosmia was more frequent in SARS-CoV-2-positive versus SARS-CoV-2-negative patients (74 versus 36 percent). Fatigue was experienced by 85 percent of patients. Both groups had impaired quality of life in the cognitive and fatigue domains. Compared with a demographic-matched U.S. population, SARS-CoV-2-positive patients performed worse in attention and working-memory cognitive tasks.

“The long-term impact of ‘long COVID’ on quality of life and potential return to normalcy, through lost productivity and lingering cognitive dysfunction, may be substantial as the pandemic continues to escalate,” the authors write.

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