Abstract:

SARS-CoV-2, quickly spread and became a threat to public health. The majority of the people are affected psychologically, socially, economically by the pandemic. We aimed to investigate the level of anxiety and fear about coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) and related factors in patients with chronic neurological disease We evaluated the patients with chronic neurological disease who have been followed up at our outpatient clinic before the pandemic. Demographical data, information about social media use, change of hospital admission during the pandemic and status of the patients' or family members' whether they had the COVID-19 disease were recorded. We investigated the fear of COVID-19 and coronavirus anxiety of the study population with Fear of COVID-19 and The Coronavirus Anxiety Scale. The study population was consisted of 247 patients (158 women, 89 men). The distribution of the patient groups was as follow: 28.34 % headache, 12.5 % stroke, 5.6% Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis 34.8%, epilepsy 13.36%, others 5.26%. Mean scores of FC-19 S, CAS of the study group were 18±6.76 and 1.31±2.42, respectively. There was no statically significant difference in the FC-19 S and CAS scores between chronic neurological disease groups (p>0.05) but females reported higher FC-19 S scores (p= 0.001). Rate of social media users was 67.6 % and 45.67 % of the patients reported that they were affected by the COVID-19 related news. Often enough, communication with chronic disease patients by healthcare professionals is a key to the patients to be adherence to the medications and follow up visits. During the pandemic, the health system needs new solutions. We think that legal regulations regarding using technological tools such as telemedicine and video consultancy should be completed in our country.

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