HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, April 1, 2021 (HealthDay News)– COVID-19 can harm several organs in the body, including the brain Now, a new research study says some hospitalized COVID-19 patients have non-convulsive seizures that may increase their threat of death.
” Seizures are a really common problem of extreme important illness. The majority of these seizures are not apparent: Unlike seizures that make an individual drop and shake, or shake, seizures in critically ill patients are generally non-convulsive,” stated study co-author Dr. M. Brandon Westover, an associate professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Health Center and Harvard Medical School.
” There is increasing evidence that non-convulsive seizures can harm the brain and make outcomes worse, similar to convulsions,” Westover stated in a hospital press release.
There have not been numerous reports of seizures in patients with serious COVID-19 Westover and his coworkers would like to know whether they take place primarily in clients with preexisting seizure conditions or if they can be set off for the very first time by the infection and how such seizures affect COVID-19 patients.
To discover responses, they analyzed data from almost 200 COVID clients hospitalized at 9 institutions in North America and Europe who went through electroencephalogram(EEG) tests to examine electrical activity in their brain.
The tests discovered non-convulsive seizures in about 10%of the clients, a few of whom had no prior neurological problems. Compared to those without seizures, clients who had seizures were hospitalized longer and were 4 times most likely to die while in the health center.
While only an association was discovered and not a cause-and-effect link, the findings suggest that neurological complications may be an essential factor to COVID-associated disease and death, according to the research study authors. The outcomes were released just recently in the journal Annals of Neurology
Research study co-author and neurologist Dr. Mouhsin Shafi, medical director of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s EEG Lab in Boston, stated the findings suggest that COVID clients should be kept track of closely for non-convulsive seizures.
” Treatments are available and necessitated in patients at high threat; however, further research study is required to clarify how aggressively to deal with seizures in COVID-19,” Shafi said in the release. He is an assistant teacher of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
More info
Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on how COVID-19 impacts the brain
SOURCE: Massachusetts General Hospital, news release, March 30, 2021
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