Neurological long-COVID in the outpatient clinic: Two subtypes, two courses.
J Neurol Sci
; 439: 120315, 2022 08 15.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1882260
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION:
Symptoms referable to central and peripheral nervous system involvement are often evident both during the acute phase of COVID-19 infection and during long-COVID. In this study, we evaluated a population of patients with prior COVID-19 infection who showed signs and symptoms consistent with neurological long-COVID.METHODS:
We prospectively collected demographic and acute phase course data from patients with prior COVID-19 infection who showed symptoms related to neurological involvement in the long-COVID phase. Firstly, we performed a multivariate logistic linear regression analysis to investigate the impact of demographic and clinical data, the severity of the acute COVID-19 infection and hospitalization course, on the post-COVID neurological symptoms at three months follow-up. Secondly, we performed an unsupervised clustering analysis to investigate whether there was evidence of different subtypes of neurological long COVID-19.RESULTS:
One hundred and nine patients referred to the neurological post-COVID outpatient clinic. Clustering analysis on the most common neurological symptoms returned two well-separated and well-balanced clusters long-COVID type 1 contains the subjects with memory disturbances, psychological impairment, headache, anosmia and ageusia, while long-COVID type 2 contains all the subjects with reported symptoms related to PNS involvement. The analysis of potential risk-factors among the demographic, clinical presentation, COVID 19 severity and hospitalization course variables showed that the number of comorbidities at onset, the BMI, the number of COVID-19 symptoms, the number of non-neurological complications and a more severe course of the acute infection were all, on average, higher for the cluster of subjects with reported symptoms related to PNS involvement.CONCLUSION:
We analyzed the characteristics of neurological long-COVID and presented a method to identify well-defined patient groups with distinct symptoms and risk factors. The proposed method could potentially enable treatment deployment by identifying the optimal interventions and services for well-defined patient groups, so alleviating long-COVID and easing recovery.Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Ageusia
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Cohort study
/
Experimental Studies
/
Prognostic study
/
Randomized controlled trials
Topics:
Long Covid
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
J Neurol Sci
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
J.jns.2022.120315
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