Cerebral blood flow in patients recovered from mild COVID-19

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Cerebral hypoperfusion has been described in both severe and mild forms of symptomatic Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection. The purpose of this study was to investigate global and regional cerebral blood flow (CBF) in asymptomatic COVID-19 patients. Methods: Cases with mild COVID-19 infection and age-, sex-, and race-matched healthy controls were drawn from the Aging Brain Consortium at The University of South Carolina data repository. Demographics, risk factors, and data from the Montreal Cognitive Assessment were collected. Mean CBF values for gray matter (GM), white matter (WM), and the whole brain were calculated by averaging CBF values of standard space-normalized CBF image values falling within GM and WM masks. Whole brain region of interest-based analyses were used to create standardized CBF maps and explore differences between groups. Results: Twenty-eight cases with prior mild COVID-19 infection were compared with 28 controls. Whole-brain CBF (46.7 ± 5.6 vs. 49.3 ± 3.7, p =.05) and WM CBF (29.3 ± 2.6 vs. 31.0 ± 1.6, p =.03) were noted to be significantly lower in COVID-19 cases as compared to controls. Predictive models based on these data predicted COVID-19 group membership with a high degree of accuracy (85.2%, p