Covid may cause changes to the brain, study reveals

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Covid may cause changes to brain, study reveals

  A new study has revealed that Covid-19 may cause changes to the brain of the infected person. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans before and after infection showed substantial alterations, according to  researchers. Even after a moderate infection, the brain's total size had reduced slightly, with less grey matter in the areas of the brain connected to smell and memory. However, researchers are unsure if the changes are permanent, but they do believe that the brain can repair. This study is published in the journal Nature. The UK Biobank project, which has been following the health of 500,000 people for almost 15 years and contains a database of scans taken before the pandemic, offers a unique chance to investigate the virus's long-term health effects. The scientists rescanned:

• 401 participants 4.5 months, on average, after their infection, 96% of whom had had mild Covid
• 384 participants who had not had Covid

They found:

• The overall brain size in infected participants had shrunk between 0.2 and 2%
• There were losses in grey matter in the olfactory areas, linked to smell, and regions linked to memory

Those who had recently recovered from Covid found it a bit harder to perform complex mental tasks. "We need to bear in mind that the brain is really plastic - by that we mean it can heal itself - so there is a really good chance that, over time, the harmful effects of infection will ease," said lead author Gwenaelle Douaud of Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at University of Oxford. It's also uncertain if all viral versions inflict this kind of damage. When the original virus and alpha variant were prominent, and loss of smell and taste was a primary symptom, the scans were conducted. However, the frequency of patients infected with the more recent Omicron strain who report this symptom has significantly decreased. According to UK Biobank chief scientist Naomi Allen, this opens up all sorts of questions that other researchers can follow up about the effect of coronavirus infection on cognitive function, on brain fog and on other areas of the brain - and to really focus research on how best to mitigate that. Other health-related behavior could have contributed to the observed changes, according to Professor David Werring of the University College London Institute of Neurology. KMB/Expat Media 

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