Daily Mail: “An elderly Japanese man developed ‘restless anal syndrome’ after catching Covid, in what doctors claim is a world first. The unidentified 77-year-old was admitted to Tokyo Medical University Hospital after testing positive for Covid. Despite his age, he did not require any oxygen during his stay and managed to start breathing normally again 21 days after being admitted.
“However a problem of another kind emerged several weeks after he was discharged. The man began to suffer ‘deep anal discomfort’ about 10cm above his perineum, the region between the genitals and the anus. This gave him an ‘essential urge to move’, according to medics who treated him. Defecation did nothing to relieve the man’s discomfort, wrote Dr Itaru Nakamura who detailed the case in BMC Infectious Diseases. …
“Dr Nakamura said the symptoms of ‘suffering’ in the anal region; the urge to move, the worsening with rest, improvement with exercise but worsening at evening, led medics to diagnose him with restless anal syndrome. They classified this as a variant of the relatively common condition restless leg syndrome, and directly attributed it as being caused by his Covid infection. Dr Nakamura said how Covid impacted patients’ nervous system was not fully understood a number of neurological conditions had been reported following infection.