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A patient in Japan had seizures. An airline worker ended up in a Detroit hospital, where doctors diagnosed her with a rare form of brain damage. Others reported auditory and visual hallucinations or losing their sense of smell and taste.
What they share: presumed or confirmed coronavirus infections.
As the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases worldwide reaches 2 million, clinicians are realizing the disease doesn’t just ravage the lungs and hurt the heart. It also can, in a significant proportion of cases, affect the nervous system in myriad little-understood ways.
Through a growing number of papers, doctors around the globe are chronicling Covid-19’s lesser-known neurological manifestations including brain inflammation, hallucinations, seizures, cognitive deficits and loss of smell and taste. It is unknown whether these are caused directly by the virus infiltrating the nervous system, or by the body’s immune response to infection.
An expanded version of this story appears on WSJ.com
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