Scientists discover the cause of brain fog in patients with Corona virus

Dr Avendra Nath, clinical director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health, said: “We have found that the brains of patients who become infected with the Coronavirus may be susceptible to damage to small blood vessels, and our results indicate that this may be due to the body’s inflammatory response to the virus. “.

“We hope these results will help clinicians understand the full range of problems that patients may have so that we can come up with better treatments,” he said in a NIH press release.

For the study, the medical team examined the brain tissue of 19 patients who died after being infected with the Coronavirus, and found that in 16 patients, there are bright spots that contain blood vessels thinner than usual and sometimes blood proteins leak into the brain, and the spots were surrounded by T cells – These are signs of an immune response.

In contrast, the dark spots contained clotted and leaky blood vessels but no immune response, and the team said, “We were totally surprised.” “Originally, we expected to see hypoxic damage, and instead, we saw multifocal areas of damage usually associated with strokes and inflammatory neurological diseases.”

However, the researchers did not see any signs of infection in the brain samples, saying: So far, our results indicate that the damage that we saw may not have been due to the Corona virus that infected the brain directly, and in the future, we plan to study how the Corona virus harms blood vessels in the brain and what If that produces some of the short and long-term symptoms that we see in patients. “

– .