How many times does the word “Covid” run trippingly off your tongue every day? How much time do you spend thinking about it, fretting over it – maybe not so much over the infection itself but about the toll the past year has taken on your finances, your activities, let alone your social life?
Covid thoughts have staked out a little piece of my frontal lobe, parked indefinitely until (I hope) it eventually fades into a distant memory, like a long bad dream.
In the meantime, here’s more to worry about! Newer research is uncovering how the Coronavirus can creep into the brain, hide there, and unleash other problems well after initial symptom recovery.
Crossing the Blood-Brain Barrier
A December 2020 study published in Nature Neuroscience showed how the “spike protein” of Covid (those scary crimson “arms” that poke out in graphic depictions) can cross the blood-brain barrier in mice. Since the spike protein enters the brain, it’s likely that the that the virus is accompanying it.
This is bad news for the brain and may account for why so many Covid-19 sufferers are also experiencing cognitive effects such as brain fog and fatigue.
The spike protein, which binds to the virus, decides which cells the virus can enter. Such binding proteins, even by themselves, can cause damage because they detach themselves from the virus and cause inflammation.
Intense inflammation, never a good thing for the brain, can turn into the dreaded “cytokine storm” with Covid. If you’ve heard anything about having the virus, you know you don’t want this to happen. It means that the immune system overreacts by trying to kill the virus and all heck breaks loose. Symptoms - fever, coughing, and expiratory shortness of breath – come raging back.
How the Virus Hides in the Brain
Another alarming mice study, published in the Journal Viruses in January 2021, revealed how the virus can effectively hide in the brain, triggering relapses in people who thought they had recovered.
In this study, mice infected through their nasal passages developed severe illnesses due to brain infections, even after the virus left their lungs. Apparently, the virus likes to reside in the brain after it passes through the lungs. In fact, these researchers found that the load of brain-dwelling virus was 1,000 times higher than in any other part of the body! As viral loads in the lungs drop after three days, they remained high in the brain on the fifth and sixth days after infection, which is when the disease can become more severe.
Since the brain is the master controller for all body functions, the result can be multiple system “long haul” problems for Covid survivors who thought they had made full recovery, including heart disease and stroke. Remember, the heart and lungs are not in control here; their functions are undermined by an infected mind.
Are you brave enough to keep reading? Here’s another study to love.
Covid Linked to Mental illness and Brain Disorders in 1 of 8 People
A study from Oxford University suggests that one in eight people who have had Covid-19 are diagnosed with their first psychiatric or neurological illness within six months of testing positive for the virus. When patients had a previous history of psychiatric or neurological illness, the figures rose to one in three.
This research, yet to be peer-reviewed, analyzed electronic health records of 236,379 hospitalized and non-hospitalized US patients with a confirmed diagnosis of Covid-19 who survived the disease. They were compared with a group diagnosed with influenza, and a cohort diagnosed with respiratory tract infections between 20 January and 13 December 2020.
Accounting for known risk factors such as age, sex, race, underlying physical and mental conditions, the incidence of neurological or psychiatric conditions post-Covid within six months was 33.6 percent.
My Take-aways and the Case for Optimism
As I type these words, more people are being vaccinated and additional vaccine developers are in line for the FDA’s rubber stamp. Numbers of new cases are ebbing a bit. Research about long-term symptoms is evolving and we will not fully understand the effects of this disease, for those who survive it, for months, perhaps years.
But the heft of research pointing to long-term brain consequences is growing too and, weary as we are of living with pandemic restrictions, we must continue to do what we need to do to stay infection-free, to educate ourselves on what the science is telling us and to do the smart thing.
Mask up friends.
Meredith
Links to the studies from this blog are here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00771-8
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/1/132/htm
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v1.full.pdf