According to a new study, Covid-19 patients have greater tissue loss in brain areas as well as a greater reduction in brain size.
As the pandemic progresses, virus effects Covid-19 on health are detailed. In a new study published in Nature magazine on March 7, 2022, the researchers came to show his impact on the brain. The work confirms in particular a deleterious impact linked to SARS-CoV-2 in the brains of people infected with the virus months earlier, even for cases of mild forms of the disease.
The brain strongly impacted by the Covid-19 virus
Conducted among 785 British adults, this study has just found that tissues in the brain areas linked to smell showed signs of shrinkage in adults infected with the Covid-19 virus. In addition, they found that older people had more difficulty performing complex mental tasks. These conclusions were made following the analysis of brain scans taken from people before and after their infection.
Gwenaelle Douaud, senior researcher and professor at the University of Oxford, UKspecifically states: We still cannot be 100% sure that there is a causal effect of the infection. But, we can disentangle the effects we observe from differences that may have pre-existed in participants’ brains before they were infected with SARS-CoV-2. “. At the global level, a reduction in brain size was still observed.
Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, hypothesizes that these changes in the brain are due to a ” lack of sensory input “. She explains this hypothesis by the fact that the shrinkage of the tissues mainly occurred at the level of the areas linked to the odors.
The researchers nevertheless come to reassure by specifying that infection with the Covid-19 virus only causes small cerebral changes, which do not necessarily imply cerebral degeneration.