Relationship between clinical and neuro-immunological parameters in post-COVID patients

The coronavirus infection continues to circulate among the population, which may lead to an increase in the number of patients with post-COVID neurological consequences. By studying the profiles of neurotropic autoantibodies, it is possible to diagnose the pathological process that began in the nervous tissue at the earliest stages of its development in post-COVID patients, which makes it possible to justify personalized neurotropic therapy, as well as predict the degree of reversibility of neurological disorders depending on their causation by a neurodestructive process or neurodysfunction. A neurological and neuropsychological study was conducted on 77 patients (average age 37.4 ± 1.7 years; 41.6% men and 58.4% women) with a history of COVID-19 (in the period from 12 weeks to 12 months from the onset of the acute stage of COVID-19) and having long-term symptoms after COVID-19. Of these, serum levels of neurotropic autoantibodies were studied in 29 patients. It was found that female patients compared to males, as well as patients who had moderate acute COVID-19 compared to patients who had mild acute COVID-19, were relatively more likely to experience post-COVID neurological symptoms and more pronounced changes in neurotropic autoantibody profiles. Neuropsychological testing revealed cognitive impairment in half of patients with post-COVID syndrome, which positively correlated with the presence of abnormal changes in the level of autoantibodies to neurofilamentary factor (NF200), and a third of patients were diagnosed with pathological fatigue, which positively correlated with the presence of abnormal changes in the level of autoantibodies to myelin basic protein (MBP).