The patients with COVID-19 mild they can also suffer from fatigue and depressionas revealed by a study conducted by researchers at University College London (United Kingdom) and published in the ‘Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry’.
“We expected that neurological and psychiatric symptoms would be more common in severe Covid-19 cases, but instead we found that some symptoms seemed to be more common in mild cases. It seems that the COVID-19 that affects mental health and the brain is the normmore than the exception”, the experts have said.
They have reached this conclusion after reviewing the evidence from 215 Covid-19 studies from 30 countries, in which a total of 105,638 people with acute symptoms of Covid-19 participated, including data up to July 2020.
In the entire data set, the most common neurological and psychiatric symptoms were: anosmia (loss of smell; reported by 43% of Covid-19 patients), soft spot (40%), fatigue (38%), dysgeusia (loss of taste; 37%), myalgia (muscle pain; 25%), depression (23%), headache (21%) and anxiety (16%). They also identified the presence of major neurological disorders such as ischemic stroke (1.9% of cases in the dataset), hemorrhagic stroke (0.4%), and seizures (0.06%).
But among people with symptomatic acute Covid-19 who were not hospitalized, neurological and psychiatric symptoms remained common55 percent fatigue, 52 percent loss of smell, 47 percent muscle pain, 45 percent loss of taste, and 44 percent headaches. The researchers say it’s still possible that these symptoms are as common in severe cases as a patient in intensive care might not report mild symptoms.
Although this review did not investigate causal mechanisms, the researchers did suggest some possible ones. In the acute phase of the disease, inflammation has been found in the brain, which may explain some of the symptoms.
Furthermore, an expert judgment, psychosocial factors related to the context of the global pandemic may play a role, as people who are seriously ill may feel isolated when they can’t see family or friends, which may explain why depression and anxiety have been found in some studies of Covid-19 to be more common than in other viral illnesses like the flu.