LONDON (Reuters) – One in three COVID-19 survivors in a study of more than 230,000 American patients has been diagnosed with brain or psychiatric disorders within six months, suggesting the pandemic could lead to a wave of mental and neurological problems, scientists said Tuesday.
The researchers who performed the analysis said that it is not clear how the virus is related to psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety and depression, but that these are the most common diagnoses among the 14 disorders they analyzed.
Post-COVID cases of stroke, dementia and other neurological disorders were rarer, the researchers said, but were significant, especially in those who had severe COVID-19.
“Our results indicate that brain disease and psychiatric disorders are more common after COVID-19 than after the flu or other respiratory infections,” said Max Taquet, a psychiatrist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom who led the study.
The study could not determine the biological or psychological mechanisms involved, he said, but urgent research is needed to identify them “in order to prevent or treat them.”
Health experts are increasingly concerned about the evidence of increased risk of brain and mental health disorders among COVID-19 survivors. A previous study by the same researchers found last year that 20% of COVID-19 survivors were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder within three months.
The new findings, published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry, looked at the health records of 236,379 patients with COVID-19, mostly in the United States, and found that 34% had been diagnosed with neurological or psychiatric illness within six months.
The disorders were significantly more common in patients with COVID-19 than in comparison groups of people who recovered from the flu or other respiratory infections over the same period of time, the scientists said, suggesting that COVID-19 had a specific impact.
Anxiety, at 17%, and mood disorders, at 14%, were the most common and did not appear to be related to how mild or severe the patient’s COVID-19 infection was.
However, of those hospitalized with severe COVID-19 intensive care, 7% had a stroke within six months and almost 2% were diagnosed with dementia.
“Although the individual risks for most disorders are small, the effect on the entire population can be substantial,” said Paul Harrison, an Oxford psychiatry professor who led the study.
Reported by Kate Kelland, edited by Emelia Sithole-Matarise