The long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not clear, and recent research indicates that many patients could face neurological or psychiatric issues down the line.
Using TriNetX, an electronic health records network with over 81 million patients, researchers for Lancet Psychiatry, a British medical journal, looked at 236,379 patients who were diagnosed with COVID-19. They found that an estimated 33.62% of them received a neurological or psychiatric diagnosis within six months of testing positive for the virus.
“For the U.S., we’re just a little bit over the one-year anniversary of our first cases,” Dr. Kenneth Tyler, a fellow at the American Academy of Neurology and chair of the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology, told Yahoo Finance. “When you start to talk about potential longer-term [effects] and what’s their natural history, you’ve got to realize we’re really in early days here and that some things may not be apparent for a while now.”
This chart shows the ratio of psychological/neurological symptoms of people with COVID to people with influenza or other respiratory tract infections. (Chart: Lancet Psychiatry)
The first documented case of COVID in the U.S. was announced on January 21, 2020. The study compared patients diagnosed with COVID-19 to patients diagnosed with influenza and patients diagnosed with any respiratory tract infection during the same time period from Jan. 20 to December 13, 2020.