![]() “You can see all three things happening at the same time,” Nath says. And blood was leaking out of the vessels into the surrounding brain tissue. The walls of some vessels were unusually thick and inflamed. “We were able to look at the blood vessels in a way that nobody could,” he says.ĭamage abounded, the team reported February 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine. So Nath and his team scanned blood vessels in post-mortem brains of people who had been infected with the virus with an MRI machine so powerful that it’s not approved for clinical use in living people. That absence suggests that the virus is affecting the brain in other ways, possibly involving blood vessels. “I kept telling our folks, ‘Let’s go look again,’” Nath says. ![]() Nath and his colleagues expected to see signs of the virus in brains of people with COVID-19 but didn’t find it. Most studies so far have failed to turn up much virus in the brain, if any, says Avindra Nath, a neurologist who studies central nervous system infections at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. That frightening scenario doesn’t seem to happen much. Perhaps SARS-CoV-2 could breach the skull by climbing along the olfactory nerve, which carries smells from the nose directly to the brain, some researchers thought. Blood vessels scrutinizedĮarly on in the pandemic, the loss of smell suggested that the virus might be able to attack nerve cells directly. Still, the results hint at how COVID-19 affects the brain. And the study finds a relationship, but can’t conclude that COVID-19 caused any of the diagnoses. It was a look back at diagnosis codes, often entered by hurried clinicians. Serious neurological damage, such as these strokes caused by blocked blood vessels, turn up in people with COVID-19. ![]() Among people with severe infections that came with delirium or other altered mental states, though, the incidence was much higher - 1 in 11 had strokes. “But they’re very different than a stroke or dementia,” she says.Ībout 1 in 50 people with COVID-19 had a stroke, Taquet and colleagues found. Mental health disorders are “extremely important things to address,” says Allison Navis, a neurologist at the post-COVID clinic at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. What’s more, depression and anxiety are on the rise among everyone during the pandemic, not just people infected with the virus. The vast majority of those diagnoses were depression and anxiety, “disorders that are extremely common in the general population already,” points out Jonathan Rogers, a psychiatrist at University College London. But it’s not clear whether the virus itself causes these disorders directly. One in three “might sound scary,” he says. “We didn’t expect it to be such a high number,” says study coauthor Maxime Taquet of the University of Oxford in England. Researchers counted diagnoses of 14 disorders, ranging from mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression to neurological events such as strokes or brain bleeds, in the six months after COVID-19 infection. That result, published April 6 in Lancet Psychiatry, came from the health records of more than 236,000 COVID-19 survivors. “It’s going to take us years to tease this apart.” Getting the numbersįor now, some scientists are focusing on the basics, including how many people experience these sorts of brain-related problems after COVID-19.Ī recent study of electronic health records reported an alarming answer: In the six months after an infection, one in three people had experienced a psychiatric or neurological diagnosis. There are probably many answers, she says. “We still haven’t established what this virus does in the brain,” says Elyse Singer, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. ![]() Sign up for e-mail updates on the latest coronavirus news and research And details remain unclear about how the pandemic-causing virus, called SARS-CoV-2, exerts its effects. Researchers are still trying to figure out how many people experience these psychiatric or neurological problems, who is most at risk, and how long such symptoms might last. But many basic questions remain unanswered about the virus, which has infected more than 145 million people worldwide. Recent studies suggest that leaky blood vessels and inflammation are somehow involved in these symptoms. Some infections were accompanied by depression, anxiety and sleep problems. Reports of other brain-related symptoms followed: headaches, confusion, hallucinations and delirium. For more than a year now, scientists have been racing to understand how the mysterious new virus that causes COVID-19 damages not only our bodies, but also our brains.Įarly in the pandemic, some infected people noticed a curious symptom: the loss of smell.
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