This is a relatively unknown consequence of Covid-19: psychiatric illnesses triggered a few months after infection. It concerns patients, without a history of psychiatric illness, who develop severe forms, with hospitalization. On this point, French researchers are publishing the results of their study this week in a journal of the Nature group. A study on a large cohort: nearly 35,000 patients from the Paris region hospitals of the AP-HP.
Their study, published this week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, proves a link between certain manifestations of severe Covid 19 and the onset of psychiatric disorders. These researchers from the Moods team at Inserm and Paris-Saclay looked at the data from these patients, and it emerged that 10% of them subsequently developed a disorder, such as anxiety or depression in particular.
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Markers present in patients who develop mental disorders
What the team of Matthieu Gasnier, a psychiatrist at the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital, shows is that during Covid, certain biological markers are present in patients who then develop a psychiatric illness: “There is the fact of staying in the hospital for more than seven days, of having an episode of confusion during hospitalization, of having monocytes which are a blood cell dedicated to inflammation. These markers, observed during hospitalization for Covid, make it possible to predict psychological disorders triggered within 6 to 12 months.“, with a 72% risk when you have stayed more than a week in hospital… and 50% when you have suffered from confusion.
And this data allows researchers to produce a model to prevent the occurrence of depression or anxiety disorders.
with this data. The researchers have calculated probabilities. Thus, if the three markers (hospitalizations, confusion, monocytes) are present during Covid, a woman over 65 will have a 50% additional risk of triggering a psychiatric troop. Matthieu Gasnier hopes to detect them better: “It is quite possible to imagine that the results will be extrapolable outside the context of Covid-19 and would allow strategies to prevent patient disorders towards the hospital.“, especially since early detection can significantly improve care,” he said.
