(HealthDay News) — Some patients with “long COVID” have incident neuropathy, according to a study published online March 1 in Neurology: Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation.
Anne Louise Oaklander, M.D., Ph.D., from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues analyzed cross-sectional and longitudinal data from patients with World Health Organization-defined long COVID without a prior neuropathy history or risks who were referred for assessment of peripheral neuropathy. Seventeen patients were tracked for 1.4 years on average.
The researchers found that 59% of the participants had one or more test interpretations confirming neuropathy. These included 63, 17 and 50% of skin biopsies, electrodiagnostic tests and autonomic function tests, respectively. Three weeks after mild COVID-19, one patient was diagnosed with critical illness axonal neuropathy and another with multifocal demyelinating neuropathy; 10 or more received diagnoses of small-fiber neuropathy. The average longitudinal improvement was 52%; none of the patients reported complete resolution during the follow-up period. Sixty-five percent of patients received immunotherapies (corticosteroids and/or intravenous immunoglobulins) for treatment.
“Research from our team and others is clarifying what the different types of post-COVID neuropathy are, and how best to diagnose and treat them,” Oaklander said in a statement. “Most long-COVID neuropathies described so far appear to reflect immune responses to the virus that went off course. And some patients seem to improve from standard treatments for other immune-related neuropathies.”
