Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand COVID-19's Effect On the Brain

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time.com

How COVID-19 Affects the Brain, Even Long After an Infection

It's been linked to brain fog, dementia, stroke, and more.
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The list of neurocognitive issues that Meropol’s team and other researchers must track is extensive: cognitive decline, changes in brain size and structure, depression and suicidal thinking, tremors, seizures, memory loss, and new or worsened dementia have all been linked to previous SARS-CoV-2 infections. In some cases, these longer-term problems occur even in patients with relatively mild COVID-19.
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Virus in the brain

Since Nath’s brain-scanning project early in the pandemic, other researchers have found the virus in the brains of people who died from COVID-19.

For a 2022 paper in Nature, researchers analyzed brain tissue of 11 people who had COVID-19 when they died. In all but one of those individuals, the researchers found the virus’ genetic material in central-nervous-system tissue—which, they wrote, “prov[ed] definitively that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting and replicating within the human brain.”

To Nath, however, that’s still an open question, and one worthy of more research. His team has continued to study the brains of COVID-19 patients and has yet to find concrete evidence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in those organs. In one instance, he says, they found viral proteins—but not the full virus—in biopsied tissue from someone who had COVID-19 at the time they were undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy. Researchers behind an April 2023 study not yet been peer-reviewed also found SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins—which are found on the virus’ surface and allow it to enter human cells—in the brains of people who died from COVID-19.

But the research is “inconsistent,” Nath says. “Some have found it, some have not, and some people who have found it, have found very small amounts. There’s still a gap in knowledge there.”
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Gray matters​

If you were to look at the brain of someone infected by certain viruses, like rabies, you would see “virus teeming everywhere. It’s black and white” that the brain is infected, says Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

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With SARS-CoV-2, there’s more gray area. Early in the pandemic, Nath and his colleagues scanned and physically analyzed the brains of 13 people who died from COVID-19. They didn’t find the SARS-CoV-2 virus in those brains—but they did find significant damage to their blood vessels, which were coated with antibodies. It looked to Nath like the body’s immune system had gone haywire in response to the virus, causing it to attack its own blood vessels and setting off a cascade of effects that led to significant inflammation in the brain, potentially culminating in fatal damage to the part that controls breathing.

In people who survive COVID-19, brain inflammation may also explain years-long symptoms like brain fog and memory loss—though “we don’t know for sure,” Nath says.
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the effects are a shade away from rabies:lupe:
 
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