To determine if the proportion of consultations from functional neurological disorder (FND) patients to a neurological emergency room changed in the months of isolation  during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using our neurological emergency departments records from 2017 to 2020, we searched for the proportion of patients with FND who presented between march and October of 2020, the months of isolation, and compared to that same period in previous years.

A total of 17,861 consultations with 398 patients with FND were registered the past three years before COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 a total of 146 out of 4105 consultations were found to have a FND. The OR was 2.91 (CI: 2.32-3.64 p= <0.001) for having a FND which shows a significative increase in the risk of having a FND during this period.  Adjustments for gender and age didn´t show differences in these results.

The proportion of FND patients during the COVID-19 pandemic and its isolations restrictions has increased in comparison to previous years. Since covid-19 related isolation is a (hopefully) one-time event. The temporal relationship between this situation and the  increase in consultations is sugestive of causality. The adjustment to unknown yearly-variable factors by extending the comparisong to previous pasts year supports our hypothesis. Nevertheless, intrinsec limitations of this design prevents the researchers to establish a robust causal relation between both factors. Further studies are needed to assess if this increase in proportion has a direct relationship with the pandemic and/or the isolation restrictions.