Hyderabad, June 9 (TIWN) About 20-30 per cent of Covid patients in intensive care unit have some form of brain involvement, say leading neurologists.

Apart from four broad categories of brain involvement in Covid, the secondary infections coming with Covid are also causing direct brain involvement.  Continental Hospitals' senior consultant neurologist M. K. Singh told IANS that they are also seeing cases of neuropathies.  "Apart from four broad groups of brain involvement, we also get neuropathies something like Guillain-Barre Syndrome when a person becomes paralysed. This is also being increasingly seen in patients with Covid," he said. 

According to him, brain manifestations of Covid can be broadly categorised into four groups. There is vascular category where there is clotting in arterial system or the venous system thereby leading to infarct in the brain or venous haemorrhage in the brain. 

The second category is direct infection of Covid virus to brain which usually manifest in "brain fog" or encephalopathy in which patient becomes too sleepy and is not arousable. "This persists even after Covid is gone and persist from few weeks to sometime months," he said.  The third aspect of brain involvement in Covid is because of hyper-inflammatory response. "In these cases, we get lot of acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis. The brain white matter and gray matter swells and it causes very severe damage to the brain. It can affect one part of the brain or can affect all over the brain," said Dr Singh.