Frequent Convulsive Seizures in an Adult Patient with COVID-19: A Case Report

Abstract

Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel coronavirus that was extracted from patients with respiratory tract infections. The most common symptoms of patients are fever and respiratory tract involvement. In this report, we describe one patient with frequent seizures probably due to COVID-19 infection for the first time. Case Presentation: A 30-year-old previously healthy female was admitted with generalized tonic-clonic seizure in the neurology emergency room. The patient complained of dry cough five days before the admission. She had seizures (five times) approximately every 8 hours. Brain MRI was normal and chest CT revealed focal ground-glass opacities. The respiratory specimen was positive for COVID-19 using real-time PCR assay. The symptoms of the patient improved with anticonvulsive and antiviral medications. Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case study to report an association between frequent seizures and COVID- 19. In our opinion, there is a hypothesis about this subject that the etiology of seizure may be due to encephalitis and invasion virus to the brain or toxic effect of inflammatory cytokines.