The research, published Wednesday in the journal Brain, causes reading to be pondered because doctors may miss signs of life-threatening brain disorders developing in mild and convalescent Covid-19 patients. The appearance and severity of brain conditions was not necessarily correlated with the severe respiratory symptoms associated with Covid-19.
“It is a concern if a hidden epidemic can occur after Covid where you are going to see delayed effects on the brain, as there could be subtle effects on the brain and slowly things will happen over the next few years, but it is far too early to judge us now ” Michael Zandi, lead author of the study and consultant to the Institute and to the NHS Foundation Trust at University College London Hospitals, said.
The study involved 43 British Covid-19 patients aged 16 to 85 years, many of whom had none of the respiratory symptoms generally associated with the disease, instead presenting neurological disorders as their main symptoms.
Of the 43, a dozen patients had inflamed the central nervous system, 10 had cerebral disease with delirium or psychosis, eight had strokes, and eight others had peripheral nerve damage in the form of Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the immune system attacks the nerves causing paralysis.
Among the patients studied, the researchers reported that a 55-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric illness had started to hallucinate and said she saw lions and monkeys in her home and received an antipsychotic medication when she was readmitted to the hospital. ‘hospital.
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Worryingly, doctors noted an increase in a life-threatening condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM): cases went from just one a month before the pandemic to two or three a week in April and May. ADEM is fatal in five percent of the cases and a 59-year-old woman in the patient group studied died from the disease.
Latent challenges
“We see things in the way Covid-19 affects the brain that we have never seen before with other viruses”, This Zandi.
“What we have seen with some of these Adem patients, and in other patients, is that you may have severe neurology, you may be very sick, but in fact have trivial lung disease.” “
The full range of neurological disorders associated with Covid-19 has not yet been determined, as many patients are simply too ill to be scanned by MRI or other devices.
Research heightens fears about long-term effects of Covid-19 as convalescing patients report numbness, weakness, memory loss and fatigue, citing Zandi “The lethargic encephalitis epidemic in the 1920s and 1930s after the 1918 flu pandemic” as a precedent for a potentially imminent “hidden epidemic” that could await humanity in the years after the disappearance of the coronavirus.
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Another 47-year-old woman was admitted with a headache and numbness in the right hand about a week after developing a cough and fever. Later, she had to undergo emergency surgery to remove part of her skull to relieve the pressure on her swollen brain.
The enemy inside
In another disturbing case note, the researchers point out that SARS-CoV-2 was not detected in the brain or cerebrospinal fluid of patients with brain disorders, which indicates that the virus has not directly causes the neurological symptoms but can rather cause our immune response to such an extent that we attack ourselves in many ways.
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