Individuals who had COVID-19 are at higher risk for a number of brain injuries a yr later compared with individuals who were never infected by the coronavirus, a finding that might affect thousands and thousands of Americans, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.
The year-long study, published in Nature Medicine, assessed brain health across 44 different disorders using medical records without patient identifiers from thousands and thousands of U.S. veterans.
Brain and other neurological disorders occurred in 7% more of those that had been infected with COVID compared with an identical group of veterans who had never been infected. That translates into roughly 6.6 million Americans who had brain impairments linked with their COVID infections, the team said.
“The outcomes show the devastating long-term effects of COVID-19,” senior creator Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University School of Medicine said in an announcement.
Al-Aly and colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System studied medical records from 154,000 U.S. veterans who had tested positive for COVID from March 1, 2020 to Jan. 15, 2021.
They compared these with records from 5.6 million patients who didn’t have COVID through the same time-frame, and one other group of 5.8 million people from the period just before the coronavirus arrived in the US.
Al-Aly said prior studies checked out a narrower group of disorders, and were focused largely on hospitalized patients, whereas his study included each hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients.
Memory impairments, commonly known as brain fog, were probably the most common symptom. Compared with the control groups, people infected with COVID had a 77% higher risk of developing memory problems.
People infected with the virus also were 50% more more likely to have an ischemic stroke, which is attributable to blood clots, compared with the never infected group.
Those that had COVID were 80% more more likely to have seizures, 43% more more likely to have mental health issues, corresponding to anxiety or depression, 35% more more likely to have headaches and 42% more more likely to suffer movement disorders, corresponding to tremors, compared with the control groups.
Researchers said governments and health systems must devise plans for a post-COVID world.
“Given the colossal scale of the pandemic, meeting these challenges requires urgent and coordinated – but, to date, absent – global, national and regional response strategies,” Al-Aly said.