Abstract Details

This study aimed to assess the correlation of neurological symptoms with the disease severity and mortality. Furthermore, different models were proposed to predict the severity and mortality using COVID-19 symptoms including neurological manifestations.

This is a prospective cohort study conducted among hospitalized patients diagnosed with COVID-19 from April 7, 2020 to January 21, 2020. All manifestations were recorded and patients were examined by a neurologist to identify neurological symptoms. The severity was classified based on American Thoracic Society recommendations for community-acquired pneumonia. Data were analyzed and models were designed using IPython 7.22.0 in Jupyter notebook 6.3.0 from Anaconda.

There were 921 eligible participants (552 males and 369 females) in this study. The mean age of individuals was 61.58 ± 17.63 years. Smell and taste dysfunctions were the most common neurological symptom, reported in 619 patients (67.2%) and were associated with reduced odds of severe cases (OR: 0.63, 95%CI: 0.41 to 0.89) and death (OR: 0.61, 95%CI: 0.38 to 0.86). Myalgia (26.9%), headaches (14.8%), and dizziness (9.8%) were other common neurological symptoms. Headaches had negative correlation with severity (OR: 0.48, 95%CI: 0.34 to 0.85) and death due to COVID-19 (OR: 0.39, 95%CI: 0.77 to 0.94) but myalgia and dizziness were not correlated. The analysis of neurological and non-neurological symptoms showed that headaches and smell and taste dysfunction had the highest correlation with patients with mild severity and lower death rate.