Object: The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-2 outbreak has been declared a pandemic in March, 2020. An increasing body of evidence suggests that patients with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) might have a heterogeneous spectrum of neurological symptoms Methods. A systematic search of two databases was performed for studies published up to April 17 th , 2020. PRISMA guidelines were followed. Results: We included 13 studies evaluating 2499 patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infections. The median age of patients was 50.3 (IQR 9.6), and the rate of male patients was 50% (95% CI 47.9-52%). The most common reported comorbidities were hypertension and diabetes (18.7%, 95% CI 16.9-20.7% and 9%, 95% CI 7.4-11.3%, respectively). Headache was reported in 17.9% of patients (95% CI 16.1-19.8%), and dizziness in 13.9% (95% CI 10.7-18%). Fatigue or myalgia, hypo/anosmia, and gustatory dysfunction were reported in 24%, 55.2%, and 55.4%, of patients, respectively. Conclusions: These data support accumulating evidence that a significant proportion of patients with COVID-19 infection develop neurological manifestations, especially olfactory and gustatory dysfunction. The pathophysiology of this association is under investigation and warrants additional studies, Physicians should be aware of this possible association because during the epidemic period of COVID-19, early recognition of neurologic manifestations otherwise not explained would raise the suspect of acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection.
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Carlo et al. (2020) studied this question.