Neurological Manifestation of COVID-19: An Updated Literature Review

Abstract

SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease known as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), is a novel coronavirus that arose in Wuhan, China in 2019. Within a short time, it rapidly spread across the world and has been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) due to its severe morbidity and mortality rate. This virus left many scientists and biomedical engineers perplexed due to the various uncertainties about its infection rate as new COVID-19 variants arise. However, attempts to contain the virus are ongoing all over the world. Some of the most common symptoms of COVID- 19 include fever, dry cough, and fatigue. However, some physicians in affected areas have discovered that some patients that were diagnosed with COVID-19 did not exhibit these expected respiratory symptoms at the time of diagnosis, but rather these patients displayed only neurological symptoms as their initial symptoms. For instance, the symptoms range from non-specific to more particular, such as headaches or dizziness which were one of the more common symptoms, to more complicated symptom onset such as convulsions, cerebrovascular and peripheral diseases.