Question: Can COVID cause syncope?

Answered by internal medicine doctor Andrew Vasey, MD

Syncope is the medical term for fainting or passing out. Generally, this condition arises when you have a sudden, temporary decrease in blood flow to your brain. Many syncopal occurrences are benign and result from a short-term cause. Syncope can happen because of the following:

There are a few reports of people presenting post-COVID who experience syncopal issues. Still, the difficult part for health care providers is that various processes can cause syncope, even without post-COVID complications. Similarly, defining a post-COVID symptom versus a symptom from another pre-existing cause is challenging.

Patients with post-COVID issues can have symptoms related to most organ systems. For example, many post-COVID symptoms are believed to be related to autonomic nervous system dysfunction. With autonomic dysfunction, a person can have inappropriate changes in their heart rate such as increasing more than it should with movement or position changes and can feel like they are going to pass out or do pass out. Many medical conditions can cause autonomic dysfunction, not just post-COVID issues.

Given all these factors, the short answer is, it is difficult to determine if syncope is definitively a symptom of COVID-19.

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