COVID-19 vaccine cannot change neurological symptoms of long coronavirus

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While COVID-19 vaccination reduces the severity of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization rate, and mortality rate, recently published research shows that vaccination before SARS-CoV-2 infection does not necessarily reduce the severity of neurological symptoms and long-term coronavirus infection. It turns out that it doesn't lighten the burden. This includes patients with severe infections that require hospitalization and those with mild infections that do not require hospitalization. Common neurological symptoms of long coronavirus include brain fog, numbness or tingling, headaches, dizziness, problems with smell or taste, and extreme fatigue.

At the outset of the study, the authors hypothesized that because the COVID-19 vaccine reduces the severity of COVID-19 infection, it may similarly reduce the neurological symptoms of subsequent long coronavirus infection. erected. However, the research results were surprising. “While vaccination reduces the severity of acute COVID-19 infection and hospitalization and mortality rates, the sobering conclusion of our study is that pre-infection vaccination reduces subsequent “This study did not alter the neurological symptoms of long-term COVID-19,” the authors wrote. . The study was published in the journal brain communication.

“We aimed to determine how pre-infectious vaccination affects the neurological symptoms of long coronavirus, patients' quality of life and cognitive function. Pre-infectious vaccination “These findings are sobering as they show that the long coronavirus does not alleviate the neurological symptoms of long coronavirus,” Northwestern Medicine's Igor Koralnik and the paper's corresponding author said in a release.

The study recruited the first 1,300 patients with neurological symptoms of Long coronavirus at the Northwestern Medicine Neurology COVID-19 Clinic from May 2020 to March 2023. Of the 1,300 participants enrolled in the study, 200 participants were previously hospitalized with severe COVID-19 infection, while the remaining 1,100 participants required hospitalization. He had only mild symptoms of coronavirus infection.

In addition to grouping patients based on severity of illness requiring hospitalization, the authors also looked at the timing of infection: breakthrough infections after vaccination versus infections before vaccination. In this study, based on the quantitative indicators used to assess quality of life, we analyzed both groups of patients: those with severe disease requiring hospitalization and those with mild disease not requiring hospitalization. It turns out that there are patients with the disease. – had Decreased quality of life, including cognition, fatigue, sleep, anxiety, and depression, regardless of whether the infection occurred after vaccination (breakthrough infection) or before vaccination. The study also found that patients performed worse on a variety of cognitive tests compared to the general population, with no difference based on vaccination status at the time of infection.

In this study, patients in both groups with breakthrough infections (severe disease requiring hospitalization and mild disease not requiring hospitalization) had pre-existing infections more frequently than their respective prevaccination infection groups. I was diagnosed with depression/anxiety. Additionally, patients with mild infections that did not require hospitalization were more likely to have comorbidities such as headache, lung disease, or gastrointestinal disease than patients who were infected before vaccination. On average 10 months after symptom onset, the three most common neurological symptoms in critically ill patients requiring hospitalization were brain fog (86.5%), numbness/tingling (56.5%), and headache (56.5%). For patients with mild symptoms not requiring hospitalization, the three most common neurological symptoms were brain fog (83.9%), headache (70.9%), and dizziness (53.8%). Patients with mild symptoms due to breakthrough infections reported dizziness more frequently (61.5%) compared to patients infected before vaccination (50.6%).

The study found that patients who developed neurological symptoms of Long COVID after breakthrough infection had a higher burden of comorbidities than those infected before vaccination. According to the authors, this highlights a range of risk factors that warrant targeted management. Researchers note that further longitudinal studies are needed to determine the long-term outcome of neurological symptoms in Long COVID-19 patients with breakthrough infection or pre-vaccine infection. I am doing it.

In another paper published in the journal neurological chronicle In November 2024, the same team at Northwestern Medicine found that the neurological symptoms of Long COVID-19 disproportionately affect young and middle-aged adults, regardless of the acute severity of the COVID-19 infection. I discovered that there is. In this study, 142 (71%) of the 200 patients previously hospitalized with severe COVID-19 were young and middle-aged and had symptoms of mild COVID-19 that required hospitalization. It was found that only 995 out of 1,100 patients (90.5%) had cancer. .

Elderly patients had a higher prevalence of comorbidities and abnormal neurological findings, but at 10 months after the onset of COVID-19, elderly patients had a higher prevalence of long COVID neurological symptoms. The morbidity rate was significantly lower. On the other hand, young and middle-aged patients are bearing a greater burden of neurological symptoms and cognitive impairment due to long-term corona, leading to a decline in their quality of life. “The novel coronavirus primarily affects working adults, has serious public health and socio-economic impacts, and requires dedicated resources for prevention, diagnosis and intervention.” write the researchers.