Characteristic Cerebral Venous Thrombosis (CVT) in COVID-19: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) is one of the diagnoses reported in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 patients). Meanwhile, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection has the potential to cause endothelial dysfunction, increase thrombin generation and inhibit fibrinolysis. This causes hyper coagulopathy, with the potential to become CVT. Therefore, this study aims to determine the characteristics of CVT cases in COVID-19 patients. This systematic review refers to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis) guidelines. The articles were obtained systematically from online databases, Pubmed, Science Direct, as well as Google Scholar, using the search keywords ("COVID 19" OR "SARS-CoV-2 infection" OR "COVID-19 virus disease" OR "2019-nCoV infection" OR "coronavirus disease 2019" OR "coronavirus disease-19" OR "2019- nCoV disease "OR" COVID-19 virus infection") AND" cerebral venous thrombosis " as well as " cerebral venous thrombosis ". After deduplication, eligibility criteria selection and critical assessment on journals, the study reviewed eight patients from four case reports and two case series. According to the characterization, CVT patients with COVID-19 had a mean age of 42.4 years, were mostly male, tended to be cryptogenic, as well as varied neurological symptoms, and increased D-Dimer in most cases. All patients showed CVT features on imaging and were treated using mostly anticoagulants. Five out of the eight patients (50%) died.