News: Long-term COVID-19 patients had same cognitive outcomes as other ICU patients, study finds

A new clinical study from JAMA Network suggests that patients dealing with the effects of long-term COVID-19, though in possession of significantly worse cognitive outcomes than healthy patients, do not fare any worse than those hospitalized for other care-intensive illnesses.

According to MedPage Today, this study was conducted at two academic hospitals in Copenhagen, Denmark, and examined 345 patients who had been hospitalized with severe COVID-19.

One of the lead authors of the study, Michael Eriksen Benros, MD, PhD, at the Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, sketched out a summary of his team’s findings:

“Our study shows that individuals with COVID-19 requiring hospitalization were more affected on their brain health regarding neurological, cognitive, and psychiatric symptoms than matched healthy controls," Benros said, according to MedPage Today. "However, when comparing COVID-19 patients to non-COVID-19 patients matched on similar disease severity—due to, for instance, other non-COVID infections -- both groups were comparably affected.”

(“[N]on-COVID-19 medical conditions” in the JAMA Open Network article were defined as “pneumonia, myocardial infarction, and other diseases, including those require admission to the intensive care unit.”)

Here are some of the particular results from the study:

• Cognition: Cognition in COVID-19 patients was “decreased compared with healthy controls […] but not significantly decreased compared with hospitalized [e.g., non-COVID-19] controls.”
• Psychiatric symptoms: The study found that there was “no significant difference” between patients with COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 medical conditions.
• Neurological symptoms: Patients with COVID-19 performed “worse” on the Neurological Evaluation Scale than those healthy patients, but not any worse than non-COVID-19 patients.
• Secondary outcomes: The study found “no significant difference” between any of the control groups in terms of secondary outcomes.

Editor’s note: To read the MedPage Today article, click here. To read the JAMA Open Network article, click here.