TITLE:
Stroke Associated with Covid-19 at the Yaoundé General Hospital, Cameroon: Series of 10 Cases
AUTHORS:
Paul-Cédric Mbonda, Victor Sini, Jose Kamgang, Hadja Cherif, Alain Menanga, Victor Eyenga, Callixte Kuate, Vincent de Paul Djientcheu
KEYWORDS:
Covid-19, Stroke, Ischemia
JOURNAL NAME:
World Journal of Neuroscience,
Vol.11 No.3,
August
10,
2021
ABSTRACT: Background: The Covid-19 pandemic, which is an infection due to the SARS Cov-2 virus,
mainly causes severe damage to the respiratory system, but several studies have
reported neurological damage with different manifestations including headaches,
seizures, encephalopathies, and stroke. We report a series of 10 patients
infected with Covid-19 who had an ischemic stroke at the Yaoundé General
Hospital, Cameroon. Patients and Methods: We carried out a prospective
study for 12 months between April 2020 and March 2021 by collecting data from patients admitted for
Covid-19 at the Yaoundé general hospital. Were included all patients with a
diagnosis of stroke confirmed by brain imaging (CT/MRI) following a focal
neurological deficit of sudden onset and whose test (nasopharyngeal swab
confirmed by PCR) for Covid-19 was positive. Patients diagnosed with a stroke
more than 2 weeks (14 days) after the positive Covid-19 PCR test were excluded. Results: The prevalence of ischemic stroke in this hospital-based series
was 1.46%. These were six men and four women. The mean NIHSS score was 13.57.
The average age of our patients was 58 years. Brain imaging was performed in
each patient revealing hypodense lesion in a
large arterial territory in 8 of them, for two patients we found multilacunar infarcts. All patients had negative
HIV serology and D-dimers greater than 500 μg/L. Conclusion: This work
on strokes in Covid-19 infected patients shows that it is a fairly
frequent neurological complication, which can occur even in young subjects
without known risk factors, the symptoms of viral infection are not
systematically present before the onset of stroke.