Headache and COVID-19: An Unholy Alliance

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by the highly contagious severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first case of SARS-CoV-2 was officially reported in December 2019 from Wuhan, China [1]. After its spread to more than 200 countries, On March 11th, 2020, the World health organization (WHO) has declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic [2]. Globally, it has affected more than 262 million people to date, causing fatality in more than 5.2 million patients [3]. The novel coronavirus primarily affected the respiratory and cardiovascular system, but frequent neurological manifestations and complications of COVID-19 infection have been reported in the literature, including headache, anosmia/hyposmia, acute myelitis, encephalitis, acute hemorrhagic necrotizing encephalopathy, and cerebrovascular accidents. Headache is one of the most frequent neurological symptoms reported by COVID-19 patients. COVID-19 headache can persist as a de-novo post-Covid-19 headache as well [4,5] Broadly COVID-19 headache falls under the classification of ‘Headache attributed to systemic viral infection 9.2.2’ as per international classification of headache disorders 3rd edition (ICHD-3) [2,4].