Abstract:

The spectrum of symptoms of COVID-19 continues to expand as more clinical observations are reported. Neurological manifestations including headache are increasingly described. However, headache as the sole presenting symptom of COVID-19 pneumonia has not been reported. We describe a patient in Tanzania who experienced severe headache for seven days before the onset of other symptoms of COVID-19 that led to her isolation, diagnosis, and treatment.

Keywords: Africa; COVID-19; Headache; Neurologic; SARS-CoV-2.

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Severe headache as the sole presenting symptom of COVID-19 pneumonia: A case report

^{Department of Internal Medicine, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania}

^{Department of Neurology, NYU Langone Health, New York, NY, United States}

^{Muhimbili National Hospital, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania}

Jerome H. Chin: gro.enognaluyn@nihc.emorej

^{Corresponding author at: Department of Internal Medicine, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.}gro.enognaluyn@nihc.emorej

Received 2020 May 8; Revised 2020 Aug 4; Accepted 2020 Aug 9.

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

The spectrum of symptoms of COVID-19 continues to expand as more clinical observations are reported. Neurological manifestations including headache are increasingly described. However, headache as the sole presenting symptom of COVID-19 pneumonia has not been reported. We describe a patient in Tanzania who experienced severe headache for seven days before the onset of other symptoms of COVID-19 that led to her isolation, diagnosis, and treatment.

Brain MRI. A) axial FLAIR image showing nonspecific white matter hyperintensities. B) normal MRA at the level of the Circle of Willis.

Chest X-ray showing bilateral lower lobe ground glass opacities.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Declaration of Competing Interest

Footnotes

^{Supplementary data to this article can be found online at}https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inat.2020.100882.

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References

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