Anomic aphasia after COVID-19 infection: a case report

Purpose
This case reports on anomic aphasia related to COVID-19. Increasing knowledge about rare symptoms and complications may aid in the characterization of the disease, understand its pathophysiology, identify more quickly possible infected people and break the transmission chain.

Case description
This work reports on the case of a middle-aged man who presented to his assistant psychiatrist complaining about difficulty with naming objects in his daily routine surroundings, with ten weeks of duration and following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The organic study, including brain magnetic resonance imaging, was unremarkable. The symptoms resolved spontaneously within fourteen weeks.

Comment
Neurological manifestations of COVID-19 may be related to the dysfunction of the blood-brain barrier, resulting in immune cell infiltration and neuroinflammation that can persist for weeks or months after the resolution of the infection. Weakened health after overcoming the infection acute phase is being reported increasingly and called post-COVID-syndrome. Rare disorders such anomic aphasia can occur in this syndrome.