COVID-19 and Parkinson’s disease: a single-centered study and Mendelian randomization study (preprint)

Objective To investigate the effects of the release of COVID-19 restrictions on patients with PD, and the association between COVID-19 and PD.Methods A single-center survey was performed among patients with PD through a questionnaire from December 7, 2022, to March 10, 2023. Logistic regression was performed to analyze the infection-related risk factors. Then, a bidirectional two-sample Mendelian randomization was utilized to investigate the association between COVID-19 and PD.Results In cross-sectional analysis, the COVID-19 infection rate of PD was 65.7%. Forty-eight (35.3%) patients with PD experienced worsening of motor symptoms. Long PD course (OR: 3.296, P = 0.047) and duration of the last dose of COVID-19 vaccine (OR: 4.967, P = 0.034) were the infection-related risk factors. The MR analysis results supported that PD causally increases the risk of COVID-19 susceptibility (β = 0.081, OR = 1.084, P = 0.006). However, MR analysis showed that PD did not increases the risk of COVID-19 severity and hospitalization. In addition, no causal linkage of COVID-19 on PD was observed.Conclusion Our findings suggest that COVID-19 infection leads to worsened PD motor symptoms. Long PD course is the infection-related risk factors, and PD causally increases the risk of COVID-19 susceptibility. However, we found no evidence that COVID-19 contributes to PD.

Clinical and Gene Features of SARS-CoV-2-Positive Recurrence in Patients Recovered From COVID-19

There are still frequent reports that a number of recovered coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients following discharge have re-detectable positive (RP) results by RT-PCR. Understanding the clinical and molecular characteristics of RP patients may have implications for curbing the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, 318 COVID-19 convalescent patients, including 59 RP patients and 259 non-RP (NRP) patients, were enrolled. Among RP patients, women accounted for a significantly high proportion (67.8%), and the titers of IgG and IgM antibodies in this group were also significantly high. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs), including 692 upregulated and 383 downregulated genes, overlapped in two public GEO datasets containing RP and NRP blood cell samples. Enrichment analysis indicated that these DEGs were related to several key signaling pathways, such as viral infection, immune activation, and inflammatory responses. Importantly, 59 indicator genes constituting the core network exhibited high diagnostic values and were correlated with markers of different immune cells. Among these, 12 drug-related genes were associated with the RP results. Our work suggests that, in addition to clinically available features, blood cell transcriptome sequencing can be performed to obtain gene signatures for diagnosis of RP patients.