Eight out of 10 people hospitalized with COVID-19 develop neurological problems, new research shows.

In early 2020, after the United States had its first reported case of COVID-19, Sherry Chou and a group of her fellow neurointensivists—critical care clinicians who have neurological expertise—became concerned that the novel coronavirus would affect the nervous system.

Chou says that history had taught them to be worried. Other infectious diseases, such as the 1918 influenza (an H1N1 virus), have affected multiple organ systems.

An associate professor of critical care medicine, neurology, and neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh, Chou created and leads the Global Consortium Study of Neurologic Dysfunction in COVID-19. The largest cohort study of neurological manifestations of the coronavirus, it spans 133 adult and 109 pediatric study sites across six continents.

“We expected there’d be some, but that was a lot,” says Chou, associate director of Stroke and Subarachnoid Hemorrhage at the Pitt Safar Center for Resuscitation Research.

It gets scarier: Hospitalized patients with clinically diagnosed neurological symptoms associated with COVID-19 are six times more likely to die than those without.

Chou says that acute encephalopathy, or damage to the brain, was the most common problem.

Read the full article about neurological problems at Futurity.