Central Nervous System Complications in COVID-19 Pa-tients; a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis based on Current Evidence

Several studies have confirmed neurological involvements, such as acute cerebrovascular diseaseand impaired consciousness in COVID-19. In the present study, our aim is to investigate the current evidenceregarding central nervous system (CNS) complications in patients with confirmed COVID-19.

Anextensive search was conducted in electronic databases including Medline (using PubMed), Embase, Scopus,and Web of Science, in addition to the manual search in Google and Google scholar search engines, for articlespublished from 2019 until April 21st, 2020. Inclusion criteria was articles that were reviewed and reported theincidence of neurological outcomes in patients with confirmed COVID-19 disease.

The initial searchyielded 638 records, from which 7 articles were included. Overall, the incidence of CNS complications was calcu-lated to be 6.27% (95% CI: 3.32 to 9.98). The incidence of the most common CNS complications, encephalopathyand acute cerebrovascular disease, were 9.14% (95%CI: 2.20 to 19.81) and 2.59% (95% CI: 1.31 to 4.25), respec-tively.

CNS complications do exist in COVID-19 patients, encephalopathy being the most concern-ing one. The heterogeneity in the existing literature causes an uncertainty in reporting the definite prevalencerate for each complication. Thus, further studies are needed for scientists to reach a more accurate estimate ofthe prevalence of these complications in COVID-19 patients. However, healthcare providers should consider thepossibility of CNS involvements in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection