COVID‐19 and cognitive impairment: A cross‐sectional clinic‐based study

BACKGROUND: Patients with dementia are more prone to acquire COVID‐19 infection. Patients with COVID‐19 showed a tendency to develop cognitive impairment. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to study the clinical manifestations of COVID‐19 infection among adult Sudanese demented patients and the prevalence of cognitive impairment among adult Sudanese nondemented patients. METHODOLOGY: This is a descriptive cross‐sectional study that took place in Sudan, Khartoum state in the period (September to December 2021) in a private neurology/psychiatry clinic. A total of 135 adult Sudanese patients were included in this study and were divided into two groups. The first group consists of 100 patients with a known history of dementia that got infected recently with COVID‐19, while the second group consists of 35 patients who developed some sort of cognitive impairment after recovering from COVID‐19 infection. Regarding the second group, cognitive functions were assessed by senior consultant neurologist and senior consultant psychiatrist using a well validated neuropsychological measure. RESULTS: Out of 100 patients in the first group, females were 60 and males were 40. Age distribution is between 63 and 98. The common presenting symptoms of COVID‐19 among this group were cough and fever (90 patients), diarrhea and vomiting (5 patients), breathlessness (4 patients), coughing of blood (5 patients), convulsions (1 patient), paraplegia (1 patient), and hemiplegia (1 patient). Regarding the second group, age distribution varied from 30 to 80 years. Cognitive functions impairment was noticed as follows: memory recall (22%), memory recognition (23%), memory encoding (24%), processing speed (16%), executive functioning (19%), phonemic fluency (17%), and category fluency (17%). CONCLUSION: Patients with dementia are more susceptible to develop COVID‐19 infection. Patients with COVID‐19 Infection are at risk of developing some sort of cognitive impairment after recovery.