New Delhi, Aug 21 : Not only children, those suffering from Covid-19 also face an increased risk of insomnia, cognitive impairment Ischaemic stroke, epilepsy and other mental disorders, as well as seizures for months after being infected, an extensive observational study of more than 1.25 million patients’ health records has discovered.
In The Lancet Psychiatry journal, the study that examined the data of 185,748 children revealed that risk trajectories after Covid were different in children as compared with adults.
In the six months following SARS-CoV-2 infections children weren’t at a higher risk of anxiety or mood disorders.
However, they were at “an elevated risk of sleepiness, cognitive impairment intracranial hemorrhage, ischaemic strokes, nerve nerve root, psychotic disorders, plexus disorders, epilepsy or epileptic seizures”.
As opposed to adults, cognitive deficit in children had the benefit of a finite risk horizon (75 days) and a time limit to experience the same degree of the incidence (491 days).
“Children have a lower overall profile of mental health risk than adults or older people, however their continued higher risk of certain diagnosis is of concern,” said the study.
A significant percentage of older adults who had the diagnosis of psychiatric or neurological, in either cohort, later died particularly those diagnosed with epilepsy, dementia or seizures.
After the development of delta variants, increased risk of epilepsy, strokes, ischaemic strokes or seizures, cognitive impairment insomnia, as well as anxiety disorders were noted and exacerbated by an increase in mortality rate.
“With Omicron, there was a lower rate of death than before the the emergence of the mutation, however the risk of psychological and neurological consequences were similar,” revealed the study which was conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK.
The study’s observational research extracted data from the electronic health records network, which is an international network of anonymized data from health records of around 89 million people that were collected from hospitals primary care, primary care and specialist providers (mostly in the US but also from Australia and the UK, Spain, Bulgaria, India, Malaysia, and Taiwan).
“This study of two-year retrospective cohort studies of patients diagnosed with Covid-19 revealed that the increase in prevalence of anxiety and mood disorders was temporary, with no overall excess of these diagnoses when compared with other respiratory illnesses,” the researchers noted.
In contrast, the elevated chance of psychotic disorder and cognitive impairment epilepsy, dementia, or seizures remained constant throughout the study.
“The fact that the outcomes of psychiatric and neurological disorders were similar in the Delta and Omicron waves suggests that the strain on the health system may persist even with variations with less severity in other ways,” the researchers warned.
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