BNA 2021 Festival of Neuroscience Poster abstracts

Introduction In December 2019, a coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 began infecting humans causing a novel disease, coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19). Recent studies show that several medical conditions increase the risk of COVID-19 infection and death. The increased vulnerability of the elderly and those with comorbidities, together with the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases, led us to investigate the links between neurodegeneration and COVID-19. Method We analysed the health records of 13,338 UK participants from the UK Biobank, who were tested for COVID-19 between March and July 2020. We fitted binomial regressions where the response variables were, respectively, COVID-19 positivity or COVID-19-related death. In all models, we accounted for a range of comorbidities including age, gender, social deprivation, number of people in the household, etc. We deposited the full analysis script on GitHub: github.com/M1gus/AD-PD-COVID19. Results and conclusions We first investigated the association between COVID-19 and multiple chronic conditions, and show that a diagnosis of dementia is associated with the largest increase in the odds of testing positive for COVID-19 (OR 3.25;95% CI 2.73-3.87) (Figure 1A). This led us to analyse the association between dementia and COVID-19 death. We found that having dementia increases the odds of dying from COVID-19 by over 4 folds (OR 4.32;95% CI 3.33-5.60) (Figure 1B). To improve the granularity of our analysis, we looked at different subtypes of dementia and found that a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common neurodegenerative disease, predicts a higher risk of COVID-19 infection (OR 4.15;95% CI 3.22-5.34) (Figure 1C) and death (OR 4.17;95% CI 2.87-6.05) (Figure 1D). This led us to look at the second most common neurodegenerative disease, Parkinson's disease (PD). Participants with PD were also at increased risk of COVID-19 infection (OR 1.74;95% CI 1.34-2.27), but were not more likely to die from COVID-19. We conclude that there are disease-specific differences in COVID-19 susceptibility among patients affected by neurodegenerative disorders. Namely, AD increases the risk of COVID-19 infection and death, while PD only increases the risk of infection.