Perioperative Complications of Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Neurosurgery

Ladina Greuter; Christian Zweifel; Raphael Guzman; Jehuda Soleman

doi:10.3390/jcm11030657

Perioperative Complications of Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Neurosurgery

J Clin Med. 2022 Jan 27;11(3):657. doi: 10.3390/jcm11030657.

Authors

Ladina Greuter¹, Christian Zweifel^{1

2

3}, Raphael Guzman^{1

3}, Jehuda Soleman^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital of Basel, 4031 Basel, Switzerland.
² Department of Neurosurgery, Cantonal Hospital Graubünden, 7000 Chur, Switzerland.
³ Faculty of Medicine, University of Basel, 4056 Basel, Switzerland.

Abstract

Background: The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been rapidly evolving, resulting in a pandemic, with 270,031,622 infections according to the World Health Organization. Patients suffering from COVID-19 have also been described to suffer from neurologic and coagulopathic symptoms apart from the better-known flu-like symptoms. Some studies showed that patients suffering from COVID-19 were likely to developed intracranial hemorrhages. To our knowledge, only a few studies have investigated postoperative complications in COVID-19-positive neurosurgical patients and investigated the perioperative complications, either thrombotic or hemorrhagic, in patients with SARS-CoV-2 undergoing a neurosurgical intervention.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study including patients from March 2020 to March 2021 undergoing neurosurgical interventions and suffering from COVID-19. Our primary outcome parameter was a hemorrhagic or thrombotic complication within 30 days after surgery. These outcomes were compared to those for a COVID-19-negative cohort of patients using propensity score matching.

Results: We included ten COVID-19-positive patients with a mean age of 56.00 (±14.91) years. Twelve postoperative complications occurred in five patients. Three thrombotic complications (30%) were observed, with two cerebral sinus vein thromboses and one pulmonary embolus. Two patients suffered from a postoperative hemorrhagic complication (20%). The mean postoperative GCS was 14.30 (±1.57). COVID-19-positive patients showed a significantly higher rate of overall postoperative complications ((6 (60.0%) vs. 10 (19.2%), p = 0.021), thrombotic complications (3 (30.0%) vs. 1 (1.9%), p = 0.009), and mortality (2 (20.0%) vs. 0 (0.0%), p = 0.021) compared to the matched cohort of COVID-19-negative patients, treated at our institute before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Conclusion: Patients undergoing neurosurgical operations with concomitant COVID-19 infection have higher rates of perioperative complications.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; complications; neurosurgery.