The world is reeling with coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). The causative agent for this disease is the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It started with an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan, Hubei Province of China, in December 2019. The coronavirus outbreak has turned into a pandemic. So far, this virus has infected more than 161 million individuals and caused more than 3.3 million deaths across different countries (see here).
The entry of SARS-CoV-2 in the cells is mediated by a glycoprotein, the spike protein, that protrudes out of the virus envelop. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 in the brain has not been conclusively established. While some studies did not find evidence of the virus, other studies have detected it in the cerebrospinal fluid of COVID-19 patients. It is unclear how the virus may reach the brain.
Patients diagnosed with COVID 19 with other comorbidities show significantly higher levels of psychiatric symptoms including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc. These symptoms indicate the increasing people’s likelihood of developing neurological disorders. Experts are critically concerned about the potential impacts of COVID 19 on increasing neurological diseases such as Dementia.
Dementia is one of the major neurological illnesses in which people suffer from a loss of cognitive functioning that affects their memory, thoughts, thinking ability and emotions. Currently, there is no cure for Dementia which makes it an even more fatal comorbidity during the COVID 19 pandemic. The devastating impacts of COVID 19 on patients with dementia have become a major medical concern all over the world.
Our teams aims to investigate the link between Covid-19 and Dementia in terms of mortality rate during the first wave of the pandemic in Italy.
The final results that are obtained by the data analysis is shown by this webpage.
The dashboard has three main sections:
- The story mode, which show the most relevant results retrieved from data analysis.
- The visualization section, in which the user is freely allowed to explore the data.
- The analytics mode in which relevant meta-analysis on the link between Covid-19 and Dementia are shown.
The final results confirm the link between Covid-19 and Dementia over the Italian territory in terms of mortality and incidence.
Feel free to click around the dashboard and to look with your eyes the impact of pandemic in different regions in Italy, focusing on your needs and requirements.