Corneal confocal microscopic parameters in COVID-19 patients with and without persisting neurological symptoms at 12 weeks and healthy control subjects
| CNFD (no./mm2) | CNBD (no./mm2) | CNFL (mm/mm2) | Total DC density (no./mm2) | Mature DC density (no./mm2) | Immature DC density (no./mm2) | |
| Healthy control subjects (n=30) | 33.5±6.9 | 50.7±19.5 | 19.2±3.7 | 12.7 (0–30.4) | 0 (0–4.2) | 12.7 (0–24.7) |
| With neurological symptoms at 12 weeks (n=13) | 26.6±6.2 | 34.3±20.1 | 14.7±4.7 | 59.6 (14.9–99.2) | 8.3 (4.1–21.9) | 41.2 (11.9–78.3) |
| Without neurological symptoms at 12 weeks (n=16) | 34.4±6.7 | 46.6±17.0 | 19.5±3.9 | 27.8 (11.7–95.9) | 6.2 (0–12.5) | 18.4 (5.5–82.2) |
| P values | ||||||
| With neurological symptoms vs control | 0.008* | 0.031* | 0.004* | 0.016† | 0.001† | 0.039† |
| Without neurological symptoms vs control | 0.914* | 0.768* | 0.969* | 0.121† | 0.112† | 0.187† |
| With vs without neurological symptoms | 0.008* | 0.201* | 0.006* | >0.999† | 0.357† | >0.999† |
Data are expressed as mean±SD for CNFD, CNBD and CNFL, and median (IQR) for DC density. The bold p values represent statistically significant differences.
*One-way ANOVA test followed by Tukey test.
†Kruskal-Wallis test followed by Dunn’s test with adjusted p values using Benjamini-Hochberg procedure.
ANOVA, analysis of variance; CNBD, corneal nerve branch density; CNFD, corneal nerve fibre density; CNFL, corneal nerve fibre length; DC, dendritic cells.