COVID on the Brain

Many COVID-19 patients have reported various neurological symptoms – the well-known brain fog, but also headaches and decreased cognitive function over months and extended periods of time. This even without serious infection or hospitalization. The research seems to be swinging between reporting neurological damage or not (not, as I reported here) – despite the quality of many of these pieces of research there is still inconsistency.

This one just out (in non-human models it must be noted) reports on how COVID seems to induce severe brain inflammation and respective injuries that seem related to reduced blood flow to the brain including brain cell damage and death not to mention small brain bleeds.

What is of interest, and worrying, is that this was not correlated with severity of other symptoms – in fact these symptoms seem to affect indiscriminately, unrelated to severity or other contributing factors such as age or pre-existing conditions. This explains why some people complain of these long-lasting neurological symptoms despite not being hospitalized.

And that is enough information for me to still be cautious!

Reference:
Ibolya Rutkai, Meredith G. Mayer, Linh M. Hellmers, Bo Ning, Zhen Huang, Christopher J. Monjure, Carol Coyne, Rachel Silvestri, Nadia Golden, Krystle Hensley, Kristin Chandler, Gabrielle Lehmicke, Gregory J. Bix, Nicholas J. Maness, Kasi Russell-Lodrigue, Tony Y. Hu, Chad J. Roy, Robert V. Blair, Rudolf Bohm, Lara A. Doyle-Meyers, Jay Rappaport, Tracy Fischer. 
Neuropathology and virus in brain of SARS-CoV-2 infected non-human primates. 
Nature Communications, 2022; 13 (1)
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29440-z