Months after a bout with COVID-19, many people are still struggling with memory problems, mental fog and mood changes. One reason is that the disease can cause long-term harm to the brain, reports npr.
Neurological disorder
Frontera led a study that found that more than 13% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients had developed a new neurological disorder soon after being infected. A follow-up study found that six months later, about half of the patients in that group who survived were still experiencing cognitive problems.
The current catalog of COVID-related threats to the brain includes bleeding, blood clots, inflammation, oxygen deprivation and disruption of the protective blood-brain barrier. And there’s new evidence in monkeys that the virus may also directly infect and kill certain brain cells.
Studies of brain tissue suggest that COVID-related changes tend to be subtle, rather than dramatic, says Geidy Serrano, director of the laboratory of neuropathology at Banner Sun Health Research Institute. Even so, she says, “Anything that affects the brain, any minor insult, could be significant in cognition.”
About the research
When COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. in early 2020, the team set out to understand how the SARS-CoV-2 virus was infecting the animals’ lungs and body tissues, says John Morrison, a neurology professor who directs the research center.
But Morrison suspected the virus might also be infecting an organ that hadn’t yet received much attention.
“Early on, I said, ‘let’s take the brains,’ “ he says. “So we have this collection of brains from these various experiments and we’ve just started to look at them.”
Study on human brain
Neurons are the brain cells that make thinking possible. But studies of human brains have produced conflicting evidence on whether these cells are being infected by the virus.
Even so, Morrison says, scientists are likely to find infected human neurons if they look closely enough.
“We’re looking at individual neurons at very high resolution,” he says, “so we can see evidence of infection.”
“This is where you get into some of the neurologic symptoms that we see in humans,” he says — symptoms such as cognitive impairment, brain fog, memory issues and changes in mood. “I suspect that the virus is in the regions that mediate those behaviors.”
Impact on human brains
A draft of a study of brains from 20 people who died of COVID-19 found that four contained genetic material indicating infection in at least one of 16 areas studied.
And, similar to monkeys, the virus seemed to have entered through the nose, says Serrano, the study’s lead author.
“There’s a nerve that is located right on top of your nose that is called the olfactory bulb,” she says. That provides a potential route for virus to get from the respiratory system to the brain, she says.
Serrano says the virus appears able to infect and kill nerve cells in the olfactory bulb, which may explain why many COVID patients lose their sense of smell — and some never regain it.
That could mean that the virus is acting in other ways to injure these areas of the brain.
COVID-19 can also damage the brain by causing blood clots or bleeding that result in a stroke. It can damage the protective cells that create what’s known as the blood-brain barrier, allowing entry to harmful substances, including viruses. And the disease can impair a person’s lungs so severely that their brain is no longer getting enough oxygen.
“The levels were really high, higher than what we see in patients that have Alzheimer’s disease,” Frontera says, “indicating a very severe level of brain injury that’s happening at that time.”
“Patients did have improvement in their cognitive scores, which is really encouraging,” she says.
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Source: npr
