COVID-19 infection affects gray cells in the brain, affecting memory, cognition, smell, and taste function: UK study

A Research In the United Kingdom, we investigated the long-term effects of a new post-recovery coronavirus infection on the human brain and made some surprising findings. Patients who recovered from mild or moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection were found to suffer from gray matter loss in areas that control sensory functions such as cognitive ability, memory formation, and sensation of smell and taste.

This study and its findings have not yet been peer-reviewed. This means that journal editors have not yet received advice from various experts called “referees” who may evaluate the treatise and identify weaknesses in its assumptions, methods, and conclusions. I will.While a peer review is awaited or in progress (the process can be lengthy), the author medRxiv service Make the manuscript available as a “preprint” prior to peer-reviewed certification.

How was the study conducted?

1. UK Biobank scanned more than 40,000 participants before the COVID-19 pandemic began. This will allow hundreds of previously imaged participants to be invited to their second imaging visit in 2021.
2. With that in mind, they used multimodal data from 782 participants in the UK Biobank COVID-19 reimaging study to study the effects of disease in the brain, with 394 participants in 2 Tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection during each scan. ..
3. They used structural and functional brain scans before and after infection to match these 394 COVID-19 patients with 388 controls who matched age, gender, ethnicity, and scan intervals. We compared the vertical changes in the brain between them.

Researchers involved in this study said that most of the brain imaging studies to date have focused on the qualitative and gross pathology of moderate to severe cases often performed on inpatients. I am. However, it is unclear whether the effects of COVID-19 can be detected in mild cases in a quantitative and automated manner, and whether this can reveal a possible mechanism for the spread of the disease.

What did they find?

1. The researchers identified a significant effect of COVID-19 in the brain with loss of gray matter in the parahippocampal gyrus, left orbitofrontal cortex, and left island.
2. The findings are consistently associated with the loss of gray matter in the limbic cortical region, which is directly related to the primary sense of smell and gustatory system. Unlike post-illness studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data avoids the risk of existing risk factors and clinical conditions being mistaken for the effects of the disease.

“Because the potential for virus invasion into the central nervous system may be through the olfactory mucosa and the olfactory bulb, these brain imaging results show the spread of the disease (or the virus itself) through the sense of smell and smell. It may be a feature of the in vivo. The taste pathway. “

U.S. medical experts said they conducted a brain study of COVID patients who died in 2020. The Washington Post.

The virus does not invade the brain, but it still causes enormous amounts of damage.
The virus was not very common, but the brains of those killed by the coronavirus were not intact. Colombian researchers examined thin slices of brain tissue under a microscope and found two major types of problems in patients who died of covid. The first was an infarct in the gray matter of the brain, dead tissue surrounding occluded blood vessels. Without oxygen, the tissue dies. The second problem that appears in the brainstem, cerebellum, and other areas was related to the swarm of immune cells. Those cells often converged around dead or dying neurons. “They are actually attacking and eating neurons,” one of the study authors told The Washington Post.

In this article Washington post According to scientific reporter Ben Guarino, Joanna Helms, a cognitive neurologist at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, found that previously healthy young adults had diminished brain function even after mild Covid cases. He says he is telling her that he has noticed. None of these were previously diagnosed with depression or another psychiatric problem.

Helms denies the lack of intensive research by medical authorities during the years during the early major outbreaks. “There were neurological problems with SARS and MERS,” she said, referring to outbreaks in 2003 and 2013, including illnesses caused by other coronaviruses.

“I didn’t fall into this pandemic with a good understanding of the neurological problems of the coronavirus.” Helms said that unless further research was done this time, the clinician’s next pandemic would occur. It suggests that you are not ready.