This nerve damage was expected by scientists given that Covid-19 experienced a wide range of symptoms, and most reported neurological problems, including headaches, numbness in the body, loss of smell and “brain fog,” or difficulty thinking and concentrating.
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This constellation of symptoms suggests that the old Covid-19 may in part arise from damage to nerve cells in the body, said senior author Dr. Rayaz Malik, a professor of medicine and consulting physician at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar in Doha.
Previously, Malik and his colleagues studied the loss of small nerve fibers in people with diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis. They observed that people with Covid-19 the old one seemed to have the same symptoms as this patient, so they decided to investigate a possible link.
The team used a non-invasive procedure to count the total number of tiny fiber nerve cells in the cornea, while also assessing the length and degree of branching of those fibers. In their work with other conditions, the team has found that, when you find damage to tiny corneal nerve fibers, it often indicates that there is similar damage elsewhere in the body. “It’s like a really good barometer of, almost, nerve damage elsewhere,” Malik explains.
According to a new study, published Monday 26 July 2021 in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, people who develop neurological symptoms after infection Covid-19 showed significant loss of small nerve fibers in the cornea compared to those who recovered from Covid-19 without neurological impairment.
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The study involved 40 people who had recovered from Covid-19 between one and six months prior to their assessment; of the full cohort, 29 had recovered from Covid-19 at least three months earlier. In addition to getting a corneal scan, each participant completed a survey that included questions about longstanding neurological symptoms of Covid.
Of the 40 participants, 22 showed lingering neurological symptoms – including headache, dizziness and numbness – four weeks after recovering from infection Covid-19 their beginning. And 13 of 29 who had recovered for at least three months reported having neurologic symptoms at 12 weeks post-infection.
“It’s very clear, if you look at the graph, that people who have neurological symptoms definitely experience a reduction in small nerve fibers, whereas other participants don’t,” said Malik.
“So there’s clearly something, there’s an immune process that’s still going on, even after the initial Covid-19 infection is over,” Malik said. “So there may be an immune trigger that gets activated and it takes time to cool down,” he said. And meanwhile, this uncontrolled immune response damages nerve cells.
“It’s not an infection, it’s an immune response it elicits,” says Dr. Anne Louise Oaklander, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and assistant pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in the new study. study.
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The infection boosts your immune cells to start fighting off the enemy and there will be additional damage,” he says. In this case, the tiny fibrous nerve cells can fall victim to this immune resistance.
In their paper, Malik and colleagues suggest that corneal confocal microscopy can be used as a diagnostic tool to help identify people with Covid-19 the old – especially those with neurological symptoms. Currently, however, the technique is primarily used for research and is not widely available in clinical settings, Oaklander said.
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