Coronavirus and Brain – Treat Neurological Effects

With increasing number of patients with Researchers are looking for COVID-19 the data carefully to better understand the coronavirus and brain. What is increasingly worrying in healthcare is the realization that the infection can not only be serious, but can also have long-term neurological consequences.

Interaction between coronavirus and brain

The effects on the respiratory tract and skeletal muscles occurred earlier in the pandemic. More recently, the neurological and neurocognitive aspects of the virus have become a major concern. The neurocognitive symptoms associated with coronaviruses therefore include delirium, both acute and chronic attention and memory deficits in connection with hippocampus and cortical damage and learning deficits in adults and children. These symptoms are significant in a large percentage of COVID-19 patients. In March, a study reported that 36.4 percent of COVID-19 patients had neurological symptoms. This includes headache, loss of consciousness and paraesthesia (a burning or tingling sensation in parts of the body such as hands, legs and feet). Not surprisingly, severely affected patients are more likely to develop neurological symptoms than those with mild or moderate illnesses.

Reliable neurocognitive assessment procedures are critical for both accurate assessment of cognitive skills and tracking recovery. Objective assessments of brain function can help determine when neurocognitive symptoms appear in COVID-19 patients. In such patient groups there is a higher risk of neurological effects. In addition, medical professionals need to research which treatments are most effective. In the early stages of understanding COVID-19 and researching neurological effects, final facts on these topics are unknown.

Possible treatment

It is not enough to monitor a patient until he has recovered from the obvious life-threatening complications of the disease. Patients must be monitored continuously to identify possible long-term effects and treat them proactively. If left untreated, cognitive consequences can manifest themselves in much worse complications that are all the more difficult to fix. There are lessons to be learned from the history of related coronaviruses in which researchers have identified neurological features. These can lead to learning and memory problems in adults and children.

So how do medical interventions for COVID-19 affect brain function? Do certain drugs or ventilators have a negative impact? As much as scientists need to understand the virus better with objective data, they should also know which interventions can help or harm patients on a large scale. These are the questions researchers want to answer by talking to specialists in intensive care. It’s only been six months since this virus came into view, and many scientists are still struggling to understand how it works and what damage it does. As people begin planning the massive social, medical, and economic legacy of COVID-19, laboratories need to study how the coronavirus and brain interact in complex and important systems in the body.

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