Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has represented a new form of traumatic event, affecting the general population worldwide and causing severe disruption of daily routine. A new urgent concern is related to the burden associated with COVID-19 symptoms that persist beyond the onset of infection, the so-called long-COVID syndrome.
The present paper aims to: (1) describe the most frequent psychiatric symptoms reported by patients affected by long-COVID syndrome; (2) evaluate methodological discrepancies among the available studies; (3) inform clinicians and policy-makers on the possible strategies to be promoted in order to manage the psychiatric consequences of long-COVID syndrome.
Twenty-one papers have been included in the present review, mostly with a cross-sectional or cohort design. Significant heterogeneity of long-COVID syndrome definitions was found. The presence of psychiatric symptoms was evaluated with very different assessment tools.
The most common psychiatric symptoms of the long-COVID syndrome included fatigue, cognitive disturbances/impairment, depression, and anxiety symptoms. The rate of fatigue varied from 93.2–82.3% to 11.5%, cognitive impairment/cognitive dysfunction from 61.4% to 23.5% and depressive-anxiety symptoms from 23.5%to 9.5%
Source: Sampogna G, Di Vincenzo M, Giallonardo V, Perris F, Volpicelli A, Del Vecchio V, Luciano M, Fiorillo A. The Psychiatric Consequences of Long-COVID: A Scoping Review. Journal of Personalized Medicine. 2022; 12(11):1767. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm12111767 https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4426/12/11/1767/htm (Full text)