COVID-19 might shrink parts of the brain, scientists say

This transmission electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2, also known as 2019-nCoV, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The results also underscore how evidence is mounting that people can still suffer from illness related to COVID-19 many months after infection, a condition known as “long COVID.” “Certain areas of their brain showed a decline in actual tissue — a shrinkage of parts of their brain,” Gottlieb said on the news program. “It’s very concerning because it does suggest that the virus could be having a direct effect on certain portions of the brain.. And I think what it suggests is that the balance of the information that we’re accruing does indicate that COVID is a disease that could create persistent symptoms.” Some of those persistent illnesses long after coronavirus infection include ongoing abnormally fast heart rates, Gottlieb said, which might be explained as a result of COVID-19 damaging the body’s nervous system. In their report, the authors of the study said they identified “significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain,” finding a loss of brain tissue known as gray matter in some regions of the brain that affect a person’s sense of taste and smell. And in long COVID, symptoms can include difficulty thinking or concentrating, sometimes referred to as “brain fog.” The authors cautioned that they can’t “make claims of disease causality with absolute certainty.” Still, they wrote, their observations are based on “a consistent pattern of abnormalities caused by the disease process” that they found, which points to “a possible mechanism for the spread of the disease inside the central nervous system.” The observational study was conducted by scientists at the University of Oxford and Imperial College in the United Kingdom and the National Institutes of Health in Maryland and posted on MedRxiv last week.