Does COVID Affect Your Brain?

Scientists found important differences in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, before and after catching covid. It does not matter if it was a light infection or not, the magnitude of the brain’s size had slightly decreased, with less gray matter in the parts of memory and smell.

The UK Biobank project tracked the health of approximately 500,000 people for a very prolonged amount of time, we are talking about almost fifteen years. It has a database of scans that were recorded before the whole pandemic had begun, something that provided an excellent chance to study and learn about the long term health impacts of Covid-19.

Gwenaelle Douaud, from the Welcome Center for Integrative Neuroimaging, at the prestigious Oxford University, stated: "We were looking at essentially mild infection, so to see that we could really see some differences in their brain and how much their brain had changed compared with those who had not been infected was quite a surprise."

Scientists found that the overall size of the brain in people that were infected had shrunken by 2%, they also discovered that there were losses in gray matter in the part of the cerebral cortex concerned with the sense of smell (Olfactory areas), and other memory-related regions. Researchers also noticed that people that had recently recovered from Coronavirus found it a little bit more of a challenge to perform elaborated mental tasks.

The deal is that we do not know if the changes will be reversible or if they will stay permanently and have an actual impact on our health and well being.

We do know that the major amount of loss in the gray matter was in the olfactory regions, however, it is uncertain if the virus attacks this area directly or if cells die off because of the absence of the use of smell after people with the illness no longer have their sense of smell.

And it is also unknown if all the variants of the virus have this effect.

Scans were made when the original virus and the alpha variant prevailed and the loss of taste and smell were one of the main symptoms.

“Your mind is what is being exercised”

Naomi Allen, UK Biobank chief scientist said: "It opens up all sorts of questions that other researchers can follow 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."

These modifications are not always seen in every infected, that is why it is very probable that they may not be important anymore for recent strains.

Bibliography

Morelle, R., & Douaud, G. (2022, March 7). Scans reveal how Covid may change the brain. BBC. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/health-60591487

Trifonov_Evgeniy. (n.d.). MRI Scan. [Image]. iStock. https://www.healtheuropa.eu/extending-the-reach-of-mri-with-new-portable-brain-imaging-scanner/104143/