The year-long study, published in Nature Medicine, assessed brain health across 44 different disorders using medical records without patient identifiers from millions of users of the US Department of Veterans Health Care System.
Specifically, the study involved 154,068 people who had COVID-19, 5,638,795 contemporary controls and 5,859,621 historical controls, which altogether correspond to 14,064,985 person-years of follow-up.
Neurological conditions occurred in 7% more people with COVID-19 compared to those who had not had the virus. Extrapolating this percentage based on the number of COVID-19 cases in the US, that translates to roughly 6.6 million people who have suffered brain impairments associated with the virus…
