A British study of neurological sequelae in patients many months after hospitalization for COVID-19 has found that “post acute cognitive deficits…were associated with elevated brain injury markers in serum and reduced grey matter volume,” according to a pre-print posted earlier this week. (A pre-print is a paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed and published by a journal.)
The pre-print is part of the COVID-19 Clinical Neuroscience Study (COVID-CNS), a £2.3 million project funded by UK Research and Innovation, a non-departmental public organization. COVID-CNS, designed to investigate the neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19, is led by researchers at the University of Liverpool and King’s College London. In late December, a paper from a different team of COVID-CNS researchers—”Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses”–was published in Nature Communications.
The pre-print study, titled “Post-COVID cognitive deficits at one year are global and associated with elevated brain injury markers and grey matter volume reduction: national prospective study,” is currently under review at Nature Portfolio. (That’s not a single journal but an umbrella for many journals published by Nature.)
The study included 351 patients, whose results were compared to data from almost 3,000 matched controls. Of the patients, 190 had a neurological or psychiatric complication associated with their COVID-19; the others did not. At appointments held a median of just over a year after hospitalization for the acute illness, patients underwent cognitive testing and neuroimaging, provided serum samples and filled out questionnaires for self-reported measures..............
