neurological manifestations and their correlated factors in covid-19 patients; a cross-sectional study

Introduction: covid-19 might present with other seemingly unrelated manifestations; for instance, neurological symptoms. this study aimed to evaluate the neurologic manifestations and their correlated factors in covid-19 patients.methods: this retrospective observational study was conducted from march 17, 2020 to june 20, 2020 in a tertiary hospital in iran. the study population consisted of adult patients with a positive result for covid-19 real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rt-pcr) using nasopharyngeal swabs. both written and electronic data regarding baseline characteristic, laboratory findings, and neurological manifestations were evaluated and reported.results: 727 covid-19 patients with the mean age of 49.94 ± 17.49 years were studied (56.9% male). at least one neurological symptom was observed in 403 (55.4%) cases. headache (29.0%), and smell (22.3%) and taste (22.0%) impairment were the most prevalent neurological symptoms, while seizure (1.1%) and stroke (2.3%) were the least common ones. patients with neurological manifestations were significantly older (p = 0.04), had greater body mass index (bmi) (p = 0.02), longer first symptom to admission duration (p < 0.001) and were more frequently opium users (p = 0.03) compared to covid-19 patients without neurological symptoms. o2 saturation was significantly lower in patients with neurological manifestations (p = 0.04). in addition, medians of neutrophil count (p = 0.006), neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (nlr) (p = 0.02) and c-reactive protein (crp) (p = 0.001) were significantly higher and the median of lymphocyte count (p = 0.03) was significantly lower in patients with neurological manifestations.conclusion: the prevalence of neurological manifestations in the studied cases was high (55.4%). this prevalence was significantly higher in older age, grated bmi, longer lasting disease, and opium usage.