RESUMO
People recovered from COVID-19 may still present complications including respiratory and neurological sequelae. In other viral infections, cognitive impairment occurs due to brain damage or dysfunction caused by vascular lesions and inflammatory processes. Persistent cognitive impairment compromises daily activities and psychosocial adaptation. Some level of neurological and psychiatric consequences were expected and described in severe cases of COVID-19. However, it is debatable whether neuropsychiatric complications are related to COVID-19 or to unfoldings from a severe infection. Nevertheless, the majority of cases recorded worldwide were mild to moderate self-limited illness in non-hospitalized people. Thus, it is important to understand what are the implications of mild COVID-19, which is the largest and understudied pool of COVID-19 cases. We aimed to investigate adults at least four months after recovering from mild COVID-19, which were assessed by neuropsychological, ocular and neurological tests, immune markers assay, and by structural MRI and 18FDG-PET neuroimaging to shed light on putative brain changes and clinical correlations. In approximately one-quarter of mild-COVID-19 individuals, we detected a specific visuoconstructive deficit, which was associated with changes in molecular and structural brain imaging, and correlated with upregulation of peripheral immune markers. Our findings provide evidence of neuroinflammatory burden causing cognitive deficit, in an already large and growing fraction of the world population. While living with a multitude of mild COVID-19 cases, action is required for a more comprehensive assessment and follow-up of the cognitive impairment, allowing to better understand symptom persistence and the necessity of rehabilitation of the affected individuals.
RESUMO
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 infection causes coronavirus disease 2019. COVID-19 was an unknown infection that reached pandemic proportions in 2020 and has shown to bring long-term negative consequences. Here, we used a case-control design to investigate the performance of relatively young people recovered from COVID 19 in objective neuropsychological tests. We found significant differences between groups for all measures of the ROCFT with a large difference in the copy, a moderate difference in immediate recall, and a large difference in delayed recall. No significant differences were found for the measures from all the other five neuropsychological tests used.About one quarter of COVID 19 patients were below the 10th percentile according to normative data.
