Acute COVID-19 infection can be followed by persistent or newly diagnosed manifestations in many different organ systems, referred to as Post Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV2 Infection (PASC). Numerous studies have shown an increased risk of being diagnosed with new-onset psychiatric disease in the first 21-120 days following a diagnosis of acute COVID-19. However, it was unclear whether non-psychiatric PASC-associated manifestations (PASC-AMs) are associated with an increased risk of receiving a diagnosis of new-onset psychiatric disease following COVID-19.
Here, we perform a retrospective electronic health record (EHR) cohort study to evaluate whether non-psychiatric PASC-AMs can predict whether patients will receive a diagnosis of new-onset psychiatric disease. Data were obtained from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), which has EHR data from 65 clinical organizations which are harmonized using the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) data model. Non-psychiatric PASC-AMs were recorded 21-120 days following SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis and before diagnosis of new-onset psychiatric disease. OMOP codes were mapped to 178 Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms that represent PASC-AMs. Logistic regression was applied to predict newly diagnosed psychiatric disease occurrence based on age, sex, race, pre-existing comorbidities, and PASC-AMs in eleven categories.
The cohort of 1,135,973 individuals with acute COVID-19 had a mean age of 40.5 years and included 56.0% females. We found a significant association for seven of the HPO categories with newly diagnosed psychiatric disease, with odds ratios highest for neurological (2.30, 2.24-2.36) and cardiovascular (1.77, 1.69-1.85) PASC-AMs. Secondary analysis revealed that the proportions of 95 of 154 individual phenotypic features differed significantly among patients diagnosed with different psychiatric diseases (anxiety, mood disorders, dementia, and psychosis). Neurological, pulmonary, gastrointestinal, endocrine, cardiovascular, constitutional, and ENT PASC-AMs are each associated with an increased risk of newly diagnosed psychiatric disease. This suggests that the total burden of PASC-AMs influences the risk of receiving a diagnosis of a new-onset psychiatric disease. This finding may be used to inform psychiatric screening following acute COVID-19 by identifying high-risk patients.