“It is possible, but perhaps unlikely,” he said, “that those who had higher risk for becoming infected were destined to progress more rapidly in the changes in their brain for other unmeasured reasons.” Those who got Covid, he pointed out, had some differences in their baseline cognitive function and in some of the initial brain scans compared with those who did not get the disease. “It contributes to an emerging theme that nerve damage was common during the first few waves of the pandemic.”ĭeeks, who is directing a major cohort study of people suffering from persistent symptoms following a coronavirus infection, noted a limitation of the new study.
Steven Deeks, a veteran HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “This study provides the most definitive clinical data available to date that SARS-CoV-2 directly or indirectly damages nerves and that this, in turn, can have systemic effects, including changes in the brain,” said Dr. “This is true even in older people.”Įxperts in long Covid praised Douaud’s paper. “The brain is plastic, which means it can reorganize and heal itself,” she said.
How long do Covid brain changes last?Ī study published in Cell in February found that a coronavirus infection of various cells in the nasal cavity gives rise to inflammation that inhibits the functioning of smell-receptor proteins on nerve cells, leading to smell loss. Nevertheless, the study’s authors don’t know whether the coronavirus caused a loss of smell through a nonbrain-based mechanism and this, in turn, prompted the brain damage, or if possibly the brain damage caused the loss of smell. And when particular regions of the brain go unused, they are inclined to atrophy. That said, the loss of smell was particularly prevalent among those infected with the coronavirus during the first two major waves of the pandemic. So they don’t know if the participants actually lost their sense of smell or have experienced long-term symptoms in the disease’s wake. The investigators had no access to data on any Covid-related symptoms the participants may have experienced.
"It needs to be determined if these patients could further deteriorate over a period of time," he said. Gwenaëlle Douaud, an associate professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford and the paper’s lead author, said that the excess loss of brain volume she and her colleagues observed in brain scans of hundreds of British individuals is equivalent to at least one extra year of normal aging. Most of the brain-related studies in this field have focused on those with moderate to severe Covid. The research, which was published Monday in Nature, also stands out because the lion’s share of its participants apparently had mild Covid - by far, the most common outcome of coronavirus infections. Gwenaëlle Douaud, in collaboration with Anderson Winkler and Saad Jbabdi, University of Oxford and NIH.įull coverage of the coronavirus pandemic The red-yellow regions are the parts of the brain that shrank the most in the 401 SARS-CoV-2 infected participants, compared with the 384 noninfected participants. Spudich, a neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.
“This study design overcomes some of the major limitations of most brain-related studies of Covid-19 to date, which rely on analysis and interpretation at a single time point in people who had Covid-19,” said Dr.
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