Hospital admission for Covid-19 worsens brain health, but may not specifically: according to a recent study in JAMA Network, patients who spent the disease in the hospital had cognitive and neurological sequelae 18 months after admission; However, this effect is similar to that found in patients admitted for comparable causesFor example, a myocardial infarctiona pneumonia non-covid or other cause that requires admission to the intensive care unit (ICU). Brain deterioration appears in both cases, but not in healthy individuals who were also followed in this study as controls.
Therefore, the authors of the research write, “although studies with broader cognitive tests are needed to confirm these findings, it seems that brain health after covid-19 is comparable to that of other diseases of similar severity”.
The work has been carried out in two hospitals in Denmark, with 120 patients admitted for covid (29 of them, in the ICU), in which the cognitive and neurological status was evaluated a year and a half after hospitalization. In parallel, data were recorded another 125 individuals hospitalized for reasons of similar severity, and 100 healthy people, who served as controls, with similar sex and age of the patients studied. The first signing researcher is Constance Peinkhoferfrom the Department of Neurology at Rigshospitalet, in Copenhagen (Denmark).
Mental deterioration, cognitive ability and even symptoms of anxiety and depression were more present in patients who had been hospitalized for covid than in healthy people, but they were not more frequent than in patients hospitalized for other causes.
The researchers point out that a single symptom of those evaluated in the covid group stands out over the other individuals studied: anosmia. “Only anosmia was significantly more frequent at the 18-month follow-up after adjusting for multiple testing. Similarly, among neurological signs, after adjusting for multiple testing, only olfactory impairment remained less frequent among controls.” healthy compared to patients with covid-19″; It was recorded in 38.7% in the covid group and 16% in the healthy control group. They also indicate that “subjective anosmia was also more frequent among patients with covid-19which could be explained by the invasion of SARS-CoV-2 into the olfactory pathways.”