How Covid-19 can damage the brain

[riversedge]

Very good article with lots of detail.---also very depressing.




How Covid-19 can damage the brain



https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-effects-of-covid-19-infection

By Zoe Cormier 22nd June 2020

Some scientists suspect that Covid-19 causes respiratory failure and death not through damage to the lungs, but the brain – and other symptoms include headaches, strokes and seizures.




For Julie Helms, it started with a handful of patients admitted to her intensive care unit at Strasbourg University Hospital in northeast France in early March 2020. Within days, every single patient in the ICU had Covid-19 – and it was not just their breathing difficulties that alarmed her.

“They were extremely agitated, and many had neurological problems – mainly confusion and delirium,” she says. “We are used to having some patients in the ICU who are agitated and require sedation, but this was completely abnormal. It has been very scary, especially because many of the people we treated were very young – many in their 30s and 40s, even an 18-year-old.”

Helms and her colleagues published a small study in the New England Journal of Medicine documenting the neurological symptoms in their Covid-19 patients, ranging from cognitive difficulties to confusion. All are signs of “encephalopathy” (the general term for damage to the brain) – a trend that researchers in Wuhan had noticed in coronavirus patients there in February.

Now, more than 300 studies from around the world have found a prevalence of neurological abnormalities in Covid-19 patients, including mild symptoms like headaches, loss of smell (anosmia) and tingling sensations (arcoparasthesia), up to more severe outcomes such as aphasia (inability to speak), strokes and seizures. This is in addition to recent findings that the virus, which has been largely considered to be a respiratory disease, can also wreak havoc on the kidneys, liver, heart, and just about every organ system in the body................................




..........“This has been especially difficult because we don’t know how to prevent this damage in the first place. We just don’t have any treatments that will prevent any damage to the brain.”

Patients experiencing lung failure can be put on a respirator, and kidneys can be rescued with a dialysis machine – and, with some luck, both organs will bounce back. But there is no dialysis machine for the brain.

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[SheltieLover]

1. K&R!

Terrifying!

[Midnight Writer]

2. No wonder MAGAts are so cavalier. They are immune to further brain damage.

[Dem2theMax]

3. That is so sadly funny.

[lagomorph777]

5. Brain damage causes COVID; Trumpism is brain damage.

[appalachiablue]

4. God awful, and scary as hell...what are we in for?

.> "Patients experiencing lung failure can be put on a respirator, and kidneys can be rescued with a dialysis machine – and, with some luck, both organs will bounce back. But there is no dialysis machine for the brain."

[dalton99a]

6. Kick

The brain is normally shielded from infectious diseases by what is known as the “blood-brain barrier” – a lining of specialised cells inside the capillaries running through the brain and spinal cord. These block microbes and other toxic agents from infecting the brain.

If Sars-CoV-2 can cross this barrier, it suggests that not only can the virus get into the core of the central nervous system, but also that it may remain there, with the potential to return years down the line.

Though rare, this Lazarus-like behaviour is not unknown among viruses: the chickenpox virus Herpes zoster, for example, commonly infects the nerve cells in the spine, later reappearing in adulthood as shingles – roughly 30% of people who experienced chickenpox in childhood will develop shingles at some point in their lives.

Other viruses have caused far more devastating long term impacts. One of the most notorious was the influenza virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic, which caused permanent and profound damage to the dopamine neurons of the brain and central nervous system. (While it’s long been assumed that influenza cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, some scientists now think that it can). An estimated five million people worldwide were hobbled by a form of extreme exhaustion known as “sleepy sickness” or “encephalitis lethargica”.