Perioperative Complications of Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Neurosurgery.

BACKGROUND

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been rapidly evolving, resulting in a pandemic, with 270,031,622 infections according to the World Health Organization. Patients suffering from COVID-19 have also been described to suffer from neurologic and coagulopathic symptoms apart from the better-known flu-like symptoms. Some studies showed that patients suffering from COVID-19 were likely to developed intracranial hemorrhages. To our knowledge, only a few studies have investigated postoperative complications in COVID-19-positive neurosurgical patients and investigated the perioperative complications, either thrombotic or hemorrhagic, in patients with SARS-CoV-2 undergoing a neurosurgical intervention.

METHODS

We conducted a retrospective cohort study including patients from March 2020 to March 2021 undergoing neurosurgical interventions and suffering from COVID-19. Our primary outcome parameter was a hemorrhagic or thrombotic complication within 30 days after surgery. These outcomes were compared to those for a COVID-19-negative cohort of patients using propensity score matching.

RESULTS

We included ten COVID-19-positive patients with a mean age of 56.00 (±14.91) years. Twelve postoperative complications occurred in five patients. Three thrombotic complications (30%) were observed, with two cerebral sinus vein thromboses and one pulmonary embolus. Two patients suffered from a postoperative hemorrhagic complication (20%). The mean postoperative GCS was 14.30 (±1.57). COVID-19-positive patients showed a significantly higher rate of overall postoperative complications ((6 (60.0%) vs. 10 (19.2%),

CONCLUSION

Patients undergoing neurosurgical operations with concomitant COVID-19 infection have higher rates of perioperative complications.