While respiratory issues are a well-documented symptom of coronavirus, researchers have found that over 80% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients experience some type of neurological manifestation as well. In examining 509 patients admitted to a Chicago hospital network, researchers found that 419 of them presented a neurological issue at some point during the course of their COVID-19 infection.
“The most frequent neurologic manifestations were myalgias, headaches, encephalopathy, dizziness, dysgeusia [impaired sense of taste] and anosmia [loss of smell],” the authors wrote in their study, which was published Monday in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology. Encephalopathy is a term that means brain disease, damage, or malfunction.