In a large-scale study in August 2021, a team of researchers surveyed patients who had experienced COVID-19 to understand how coronavirus infection can affect the brain. results found that even cases of COVID-19 with milder symptoms can leave traces in the brain — although it is not clear how long it will last. , despite the fact that the new discovery is quite preliminary, has raised our concerns about the potential long-term impact of COVID-19.
Coronavirus Pulmonary infection Data map
For a year and a half after the pandemic, researchers have been steadily collecting new important insights on the impact of COVID-19 on the body and brain. Jessica Bernard, a cognitive neuroscientist from Texas A&M University, said:
My past research focuses on understanding how normal brain changes related to aging, especially in the middle-aged and elderly stages, affect people's ability to think and act.
However, as more and more evidence suggests that COVID-19 can have an impact on the patient’s body and brain for months or even longer after infection, the research team is beginning to be interested in exploring how it affects natural processes such as aging.
After the release of this study in August 2021, it quickly attracted great attention from the neuroscience industry. The research team referred to an existing database called UK Biobank, which contains brain imaging data from more than 45,000 British people since 2014.
After comparing the brain imaging data of confirmed patients with COVID-19, they compared it with study participants who were not infected with COVID-19.
and more detailed grouping matches were carried out according to common risk factors such as age, gender, baseline test date, study location, and health variables/social and economic conditions.
35 / 85 years old brain image comparison, orange arrows point to thinner gray matter in older people, and green arrows point to the (purple circle) area filled with cerebrospinal fluid due to reduced brain capacity.
The research team found significant differences between patients infected with COVID-19 and those with uninfected people (composed of neuronal cell bodies that process information in the brain).
Specifically, the brain regions in the infected group, called the frontal and temporal lobes, exhibited a decrease in thickness of gray matter tissue—a very different from the classic pattern seen in the control group without COVID-19 infection.
Usually, the volume or thickness of gray matter will change with age. But among people infected with COVID-19, the degree of change is much higher than normal.
And when researchers looked at individuals who were so severe that they needed hospitalization, they also observed this same phenomenon as those who experienced COVID-19.
Finally, researchers investigated the impact of COVID-19 infection on patients' cognitive abilities and found that their information processing speed was slower than that of uninfected patients.
