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Science

Even Mild Covid is Linked To Brain Damage, Scans Show (nbcnews.com) 149

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
During at least the first few months following a coronavirus infection, even mild cases of Covid-19 are associated with subtle tissue damage and accelerated losses in brain regions tied to the sense of smell, as well as a small loss in the brain's overall volume, a new British study finds. Having mild Covid is also associated with a cognitive function deficit. NBC: These are the striking findings of the new study led by University of Oxford investigators, one that leading Covid researchers consider particularly important because it is the first study of the disease's potential impact on the brain that is based on brain scans taken both before and after participants contracted the coronavirus. "This study design overcomes some of the major limitations of most brain-related studies of Covid-19 to date, which rely on analysis and interpretation at a single time point in people who had Covid-19," said Dr. Serena S. Spudich, a neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

The research, which was published Monday in Nature, also stands out because the lion's share of its participants apparently had mild Covid -- by far, the most common outcome of coronavirus infections. Most of the brain-related studies in this field have focused on those with moderate to severe Covid. Gwenaelle Douaud, an associate professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford and the paper's lead author, said that the excess loss of brain volume she and her colleagues observed in brain scans of hundreds of British individuals is equivalent to at least one extra year of normal aging. "It is brain damage, but it is possible that it is reversible," she said. "But it is still relatively scary because it was in mildly infected people."
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Even Mild Covid is Linked To Brain Damage, Scans Show More

Even Mild Covid is Linked To Brain Damage, Scans Show

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  • Correlation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday March 07, 2022 @01:34PM (#62333745)

    How do we know that these numbers are because brain damaged idiots refused the vaccine and then caught themselves covid? That would make the statistics look like covid victims got brain damage, when actually the people getting it were previously brain damaged.

      • You could have been going for Funny insight. The AC FP was probably trying to--but I recommend against modding AC up, just on principle.

        My feeble attempt at a joke:

        You don't have to be insane to vote for a lunatic megalomaniac liar, but it sure helps.

        (Which reminds me of the sad Ukrainian situation. Maybe Putin's brain became more broken due to Covid-19? Or has "the master become the student"? It's really hard to see how the master could have become the student of the great liar, but Putin's lies about Ukra

        • I find the right-wing Trump voter conspiracy kook demographic is composed of two groups. One group is just low IQ, 80-100 IQ people too dumb to reason anything out so they look for a team to belong to and do their thinking for them.

          The other group are fairly or sometimes even very intelligent but suffer from various psychological issues that push them in that direction. I knew a super smart guy, high IQ but he bought into all sorts of conspiracy theories and was even an Alex Jones follower (this was about a

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            I think there are many ways to analyze the new base of the fake Republicans. I prefer psychological, perhaps even philosophical, approaches deeper than your examples... In particular, research indicates that about 30% of most population groups will have a preference for following authoritarian leaders rather than thinking for themselves. That doesn't matter so much when they are divided up, but TFG has done a remarkable job of getting all of them together and moving in the same direction behind him.

            (Philoso

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by KF7IOR ( 8945637 )
      They scanned both before and after, so it's supposed to be ruling out any prior damage.
      • Interesting, I assumed it was sort of like the "Biggest Loser" study the fat acceptance nuts always quote where they measured the metabolism after but guesstimated the metabolism before.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by michaelni ( 5226911 )
      The paper compares 2 scans per person. One before covid and one after. So if the covid group had brain damage before the study that would not show up as a difference between the 2 scans. Whatever is the cause should be between the 2 scans. Also reading the paper one discusses can sometimes be helpful.
    • And here I am with no mod points today... Amen.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      1) the study was in the UK.

      Gwenaelle Douaud, an associate professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford and the paper's lead author, said that the excess loss of brain volume she and her colleagues observed in brain scans of hundreds of British individuals is equivalent to at least one extra year of normal aging

      2) the study only covered people diagnosed between march 2020 and april 2021 with the vast majority during a time where a vaccine was not available.
      https://static-content.springe... [springer.com]

      The only caveat I would add is that given that it is the UK, did they ask those participating in the study to refrain from the heavy binge drinking they are known for? ;-)

      • The only caveat I would add is that given that it is the UK, did they ask those participating in the study to refrain from the heavy binge drinking they are known for? ;-)

        Who do you think drinks more..the UK vs the US?

        After just coming out of the final weekend of Mardi Gras last week, I'd think based on that alone, we'd be in the lead this year....and St. Pat's celebrations here kick in with parades, etc this weekend again.

        • Who do you think drinks more..the UK vs the US?

          It's the UK. By a pretty substantial margin, actually. in 2016 the US put away 9.8 liters of alcohol per person. The UK downed 11.4. Of course, they're both pikers compared to, say, Lithuania, which guzzled 15.0

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by e3m4n ( 947977 )
          I wish we had a big st patties day celebration here. Though this weekend seems a bit early. Is it too much to ask for that march 17th be a day off holiday full of drunken debauchery? lol. Supposedly, according to a site in the UK 24% are alcoholics and 27% binge drink on their heaviest drinking days. But like any statistic it really is relative to what defines 'binge' and 'alcoholic'. Those are such subjective terms. If binge means drink till you pass out, that would probably be bad.

    • Clearly you've had COVID, or you would've been able to comprehend the summary saying the study is "based on brain scans taken both before and after participants contracted the coronavirus."

      • Clearly you've had COVID, or you would've been able to comprehend the summary saying the study is "based on brain scans taken both before and after participants contracted the coronavirus."

        Actually, the truly sad part is that he has never had Covid.

        His idiocy is genetic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      How do we know that these numbers are because brain damaged idiots refused the vaccine and then caught themselves covid?

      Well, for one, if you RTFA you'll find that these were infections contracted before the vaccine was available. You'd also find that they compared to an un-infected control group that also had (presumably aging-related) brain loss, just that the infected group had more loss.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GoRK ( 10018 )

      I appreciate the sentiment of your comment, but the research here is actually completely expected based on some of the very earliest findings from early 2020. Despite COVID's effects on the peripheral nervous system being well characterized early on, since it was never sensationalized by the media, most people are still mostly ignorant to it. This is pretty surprising to me, since I think telling people their taste and smell are truthfully and permanently fucked would play really well in today's media circu

    • No I'm doesn't !!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      We read the summary.

      Specifically, we note the part where they scan people before they get COVID, and again after, and compare the *change*.

    • Let's make the interpretation of this important finding political, said nobody serious ever

    • How do we know that these numbers are because brain damaged idiots refused the vaccine and then caught themselves covid? That would make the statistics look like covid victims got brain damage, when actually the people getting it were previously brain damaged.

      They designed the study to only accept participants that had relatively recent, but pre-Pandemic, brain scans.

      The advantage (if you will) of having a Pandemic is that it is very easy to find a statistically significant, and widely diverse, study population. That speeds things up quite a bit, and makes it easier to factor-out other possible causes.

  • Focus Research Here (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ranton ( 36917 ) on Monday March 07, 2022 @01:35PM (#62333751)

    Focusing research on the long term effects of Covid for even mild cases is hopefully where a significant if not most of the research is happening now. The number of people who have ever had Covid will soon be similar to the number who have ever had the flu, so understanding how to minimize impact for those who get mild cases is critical. We have vaccines and it looks like they can modify them quickly for new variants, so dealing with the long term effects of Covid looks like the new priority.

    • I'm curious though with all of these studies if we have arms of research for comparing "cold" viruses.

      How many Covid factoids are unique to covid and how many are true if we had hundreds of billions of dollars for research.

      While it's important to study the impacts of something new, I think spending all of our money on Covid research without discerning which effects are just general "viral infection" impacts and which are "Covid infection" impacts to narrow our response to the uniquely dangerous mechanisms t

      • I’ve been wondering much the same thing. Very few other viruses have been studied so intensely by so many for so long. I have been curious about all the ‘covid related’ side effects, and the possibility that residual side effects from *other* common viruses might be explaining factors in a host of illnesses. Probably the common cold produces serious long term side effects, but they have never been linked because no one was looking.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbengt ( 874751 )

          I’ve been wondering much the same thing. Very few other viruses have been studied so intensely by so many for so long.

          It's a reasonable question, but your second sentence needs a citation, because I doubt it could actually be true for a virus that's only been known a couple of years.

          • You are correct, the statement ‘very few other virus has been studied so intensely by so many for so long’ is an assumption on my part. I base that assumption on reports in the news of researchers in other branches of medicine, such as cancer, heart disease, and brain related research. These are not fields one would expect to be doing research into a respiratory transmitted virus. Perhaps I am wrong, and these researchers regularly look at viruses that to laymen are seemingly unrelated to their

    • First I'd like to know if other types of virii and illnesses have similar effects on the brain. Has this type of research ever been done on the flu?

    • We're basically going to need to understand how viral-provoked autoimmune neurological damage works AND how to reverse it (not just stop or prevent it) in the next couple of years, or we're looking at something bordering an extinction level event.

      What this paper doesn't mention is that the type of damage normally seen is called hypometabolism. It's an irreversible, degenerative condition that is also at the root of progressive dementias like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and Dementia with Lewy Bodies. So it's n

      • or we're looking at something bordering an extinction level event

        What? How do you figure?

        • How gracefully do you think current global society will, or even could, handle 1 in 4 people having Alzheimers or Parkinsons?

          Things would collapse. Society cannot function with that kind of crisis. Food production, transportation, energy supply, pretty much every continual process that organized human society relies on would be wildly disrupted with snowballing second and third-order effects. And it doesn't even have to be a total breakdown of those processes; society working relies on them continuing IN

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by BranMan ( 29917 )

            You forgot "Dogs and cats living together - Mass hysteria!".

            Um... no. Covid-19 is not going to collapse civilization. I doubt 1 in 4 people eventually developing Alzheimer's or Parkinson's is any worse than the entire population slowly poisoning themselves through leaded gasoline fumes, as happened for decades. Society did not collapse then, and it won't in the years to come either.

            We are much more resilient than that.

    • We have vaccines and it looks like they can modify them quickly for new variants,

      Nowhere near quickly enough to be of any use. We are still waiting on a vaccine for the omicron variant that is in development and promised for sometime this month but the omicron wave is basically already over.

  • During at least the first few months following a coronavirus infection, even mild cases of Covid-19 are associated with subtle tissue damage and accelerated losses in brain regions tied to the sense of smell, as well as a small loss in the brain's overall volume, a new British study finds.

    So they talk about brain overall volume and the other day, there was a post about pollution and that. Is this meaningful? Does this mean brain cells are dying? ...or is your brain just storing a bit less fluid? Is volume a function of the number of brain cells?

    This seems scary, but I don't have the background to know if this should be a cause for concern.

    • So they talk about brain overall volume and the other day, there was a post about pollution and that. Is this meaningful? Does this mean brain cells are dying? ...or is your brain just storing a bit less fluid? Is volume a function of the number of brain cells?

      This seems scary, but I don't have the background to know if this should be a cause for concern.

      Nor should you.

      It's a click-bait article meant to instill emotional engagement, and the two strongest emotions are fear and anger. Anyone can frame anything to evoke fear or anger, it's all the rage now.

      The actual question you want to ask is this: does this finding inform my future actions? It does not.

      There are *so many* competing considerations here that it's impossible to predict the ramifications. Some that come to mind:

      1) Getting Covid has effects on the brain. Does getting the vaccine have similar eff

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Your brain fluctuates in size measurably with the time of day, hydration, etc., but the key is *fluctuates*. When it goes down and stays down, that indicates tissue loss.

      Once you're 25 or so, your brain starts shrinking. Some things speed that up. Apparently having a mild case of COVID adds about the equivalent of a year's worth of normal aging loss.

  • What happening in Ukraine is the Next Thing to fight over, talking about COVID is passe. Anyone who wanted vaccine got vaccinated by now, everyone else knows what their chances are.

    • No it's not. The powers that be will still want their digital vaccine passport, and other forms of social credit score that they can use to impose their will at the flick of a switch. Only now they'll have a huge distraction to provide cover, as they slowly turn the screws.

      • Say all your ramblings are true. What is their will? What are they trying to accomplish?

        • What do the people with all the power and money want? More control, and security for themselves that their rule goes unchallenged. Social credit scoring and digital currency goes a long ways towards that goal.

      • No it's not. The powers that be will still want their digital vaccine passport, and other forms of social credit score that they can use to impose their will at the flick of a switch.

        Really?

        Wow..where do you live where they're still doing that?

        Hell, most places never even required any proof of vaccine to do anything, and those that had it have pretty much dropped it by now.

        Only one city near me had any type vaccine proof mandates for any actives....all others never had any.

        Are you from outside the US?

      • They already can do that with a credit score. They don't need anything else to make it difficult to live like an otherwise normal middle class person.
  • ... they're trying to reproduce.
  • I had covid exactly two years ago. I didn't have a loss of smell, but it was followed by months of depression and difficulty focusing. Two years later, my sense of smell is so strong it's mostly annoying; I can smell which mask I wore for 30 seconds in a public restroom a week ago, if I wore a mask in a moldy building for a few minutes or if I wore my jacket in a restaurant(and which restaurant) for a few minutes. :/ I would rather not.

    • Two years later, my sense of smell is so strong it's mostly annoying; I can smell which mask I wore for 30 seconds in a public restroom a week ago, if I wore a mask in a moldy building for a few minutes or if I wore my jacket in a restaurant(and which restaurant) for a few minutes. :/ I would rather not.

      You're still wearing a mask...?

      Why?

      Aside from having to wear one on an airplane traveling for Xmas, I've not really worn one since I got my 2nd covid vaccine last April...no one else around here has been

      • Have they not lifted the mandates you had where you are?

        Are others where you live still wearing masks?

        May I ask what part of the country you are living?

        Russia?

        I'm not the OP, but seriously, there are still lots of parts of the world where people wear masks, either out of courtesy or regulation. Take a look at this somewhat random news story about Taiwan (from a search engine query on china news): https://www.aljazeera.com/news... [aljazeera.com]

        The main photo shows a woman holding a sign that reads "Taiwan Stands with Ukraine", so we know it's quite recent.

        • Well, that's Asians in Asian countries....

          They've been known to wear masks a lot even before the pandemic...so, I'd not count that.

          I mean "normal" countries and cultures that never wore a mask in their life before the pandemic hit and are returning to that normal lifestyle.

          • You don't think Asian countries or cultures are 'normal,' as you put it. That tells us everything we need to know to judge the value of your opinion.
      • East Coast. It's generally a polite thing to do here and I do it instinctively by now. If I notice nobody else is masked I take mine off. It really isn't a big burden for me either way and given that I can smell what everyone has eaten recently it gives me a bit of a barrier.

  • Remember that for a study's findings to be considered true, the study should be replicated by a different group.

    That's especially true in medical studies as both Amgen and Bayer independently found that more than half of their internal research was not reproducible. Those two studies woke a lot of folks up to the fact that scientists are humans and make mistakes just like everyone else.

    tl;dr Skepticism is warranted until study is replicated.

  • Has this same analysis been performed for many other diseases?

  • Lyme's disease is a real thing, "chronic" Lyme's disease is mostly not. 99% of the people who tell you they have Lyme's and have for years are suffering from something else or it's entirely psychogenic. Yet this whole weird subculture pops up around it online, they all talk to each other about brain fog, and "spirochetes", , their many imagine co-infections, and all this other in-language. Then they feed on each other and pull more people in. It's a mental illness usually, go online into some of their forum

    • "Spirochetes" are the morphological type of bacteria that cause Lyme's (Borellia spp.), it isn't in and of itself a pseudoscientific term. But otherwise, yes, it does have quite the aura of social illness a la morgellon's syndrome.
      • I know, but they bandy the term about constantly along with all their other weirdo phrases and in-speak. And yeah, I first read about the morgellons lunacy while going down the Lyme rabbit hole.

  • Bad news for antivaxxers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday March 07, 2022 @05:26PM (#62334497)

    They already don't have much brain to begin with.

  • Since the majority of cases were pre-vaxx, it'll be interesting to see if the cytotoxic element was S1/S2 spike or something else and if so whether it was pre or post conformal.

    Let's hope it wasn't.

  • For a while now I've wondered if some of the unique things we've discovered about covid (such as 100% asymptomatic infections in which only the nasal passages are infected yet result in the same viral load as a symptomatic person) may be common to other respiratory or corona family viruses as well. Due to the amount of money and research spent on COVID, we've learning far more about it than we know about more common things like the flu and common cold.

    Which leads me to the point of this post, which is that

    • People just used to die of natural causes and that was good enough. Now, somebody dies and everyone wants a detailed explanation...

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