Clinical Patterns of Guillain-Barré Syndrome Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic

Clinical Patterns of Guillain-Barré Syndrome Associated with the COVID-19 PandemicBackground: Guillain Barré Syndrome is an autoimmune disease, with progressive weakness and areflexia, it can be triggered due to antigenic mimicry, and the association of COVID-19 and GBS cases throughout the pandemic has been reported worldwide.Objective: to identify the clinical patterns of GBS associated with COVID-19 and its neurophysiological variants. Method: (51) patients were collected during 2021 who were admitted to Baghdad Medical City and Neuroscience Hospital, and diagnosed with GBS according to the Asbury criteria, all of them had serological or radiological evidence of current or recent COVID-19 infection, the neurophysiological study was done for all of them and variants were identified.Results: males were (56.9%), half of GBS cases were presented in late spring after the peak of the second COVID-19 wave, the mean time interval between antecedent COVID-19 and GBS onset was 3.45 weeks, (82.4%) was ascending pattern, (5.9%) paraparetic, (5.9%) bilateral facial with distal paraesthesia, about (64.7%) had the demyelinating variant on Neurophysiological study, axonal in (29.4%) and equivocal in (5.9%).Conclusion: Despite the limitations of our study, being a descriptive cross-sectional one, it represents the first snapshot of the relationship between COVID-19 and GBS in a large cohort of patients in Iraq, the classical ascending pattern is the most common clinical pattern associated with COVID-19 and demyelinating variant in neurophysiological studies.