Pediatria pre prax 3/2023

A case report of a patient with a development of a mental disorder after overcoming the COVID-19 disease

In 2019, Wuhan, the ninth largest city in the People’s Republic of China, has become the epicentre of global history. A local epidemic of the so called “novel coronavirus” has quickly spread to the whole world. The first case of a coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 infection on the territory of the Slovak Republic was officially confirmed on the 6th of March 2020. COVID-19 most commonly affects the respiratory system and manifests itself with a range of symptoms from asymptomatic carrying to life-threatening conditions that in some cases end in a multiorgan failure. Despite novel coronavirus causing primarily a respiratory disease, it is very often linked to neuropsychiatric symptoms, most notably the loss of smell and taste. According to some sources a quarter to a third of patients that recover from COVID-19 still experiences some symptoms for weeks or even months after the recovery and we call this the “postcovid syndrome” or “long covid”. It is also possible to find some patients that develop mental disorders after they have had COVID-19, although the pathogenesis of these disorders is still an object of ongoing research. In this article we present the case of a 17-years old patient who had previously never been dispensed by a pedopsychiatrist and was without a significant family history of mental disorders. In January 2021 he was positively tested for COVID-19 and had a mild case of this disease. Directly after a recovery from COVID-19, the patient has started showing symptoms of a cognitive impairment, memory dysfunction, insomnia as well symptoms of anxiety and depression. The patient was subsequently hospitalised at the Department of Paediatric Psychiatry and the Department of Paediatric Neurology at the National Institute of Children’s Diseases in Bratislava, where he was thoroughly examined for differential-diagnostic purposes. The patient needed to be hospitalised at the Department of Paediatric Psychiatry again later the same year after a change and worsening of the patient’s symptoms. This case study records the important facts from the patient’s medical history, the course of his diagnosis and treatment.

Keywords: COVID-19, bipolar disorder, postcovid syndrome, adolescents, hypomania