One of the many hints that a person is COVID-19 positive is losing the sense of taste and smell. Because of this, health experts believe that COVID-19 is affecting the nervous system. Physicians have also documented neurological symptoms in a significant number of COVID-19 patients.
Some patients reported headaches, dizziness, and other minor symptoms, while other patients have had more serious problems like confusion and impaired movement. Some even had seizures and strokes.
Loss of smell and taste
The reports about what the patients go through have been circulating on message boards that are used by physicians, and they are just now making their way into the scientific literature that can be viewed by the public. No one knows how widespread neurological symptoms are, nor the extent to which they contribute to the overall clinical picture for COVID-19.
Another mystery is whether COVID-19 can attack the nervous system of the patient by directly by infecting neurons or cause neurological symptoms indirectly, by triggering rampant inflammation or blood clotting.
According to Samuel Pleasure, a neuroscientist and neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco said that there are critical questions about the extent of the COVID-19 symptoms. For a small number of patients, neurological symptoms seem to be the earliest or even the only indicator of infection. But for other patients, lingering or post-infection neurological problems could complicate recovery.
Reports of lost smell and taste have been circulating for months. In one of the first journal articles on the subject, Carol Yan, a rhinologist at the University of California, San Diego and her colleagues describe results from an online survey of 262 patients in the UCSD hospital system. More than 2/3 of those who tested positive for COVID-19 experienced loss of smell and taste.
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The deficits were not subtle, but fortunately, patients seem to get their sense of smell and taste back as soon as they get better. The team reported in the International Forum of Allergy and Rhinology. The reports have prompted several medical associations for nose, ear and throat specialist to issue statements urging physicians to consider anosmia as a screening tool for COVID-19 and advise people who experience a loss of smell or taste to consider self-isolating.
Yan speculates that the presence of anosmia could be a clue to how the COVID-19 might progress. She also noted that most patients in her study had mild cases of COVID-19, and most were not hospitalized and none required a ventilator.
Neurological symptoms
There are also reports of other neurological symptoms in COVID-19 patients that have emerged from France, China, and elsewhere. In one of the first studies, doctors in Wuhan reported in JAMA Neurology that 214 patients that were hospitalized between mid-January and mid-February experienced neurological symptoms that ranged from headaches and dizziness to movement difficulties, impaired consciousness, and seizures.
The role of COVID-19 in the said symptoms remains an open question, especially for critically ill patients who are likely to have low oxygen levels or preexisting conditions that could cause the same symptoms. Pleasure said that the kinds of symptoms that were more common in the more severe patients could be happening in part because the patients are so sick and not because they are diagnosed with COVID-19.
