Since the start of the pandemic, researchers have learned a lot about the health effects of COVID-19 infection. In particular, the long-term effects, or “long COVID,” have been become an especially common area of study. Researchers have been trying to identify the long-term health consequences of COVID-19 infection in people. As a result of this work, researchers have identified a number of long-COVID symptoms, which are often neurological in nature: difficulty concentrating, headaches, changes to a person’s sense of smell, and even psychiatric conditions like anxiety or depression.
A team of researchers is adding to this growing body of knowledge with a new study examining the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection on the brain. Their work will be presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
Specifically, researchers used susceptibility-weighted MRI imaging to study the brains of people who had COVID-19 versus health brains. In total, about 46 patients were scanned within 6 months of recovering from COVID-19 infection, and about 30 participants were scanned who did not have COVID-19 infection as a control group.
Susceptibility-weighted imaging allows researchers to identify how much of certain compounds, such as blood and iron, are magnetized when exposed to the MRI scan, which can help identify conditions like tumors, bleeds, and more. Recognizing changes in “susceptibility values” in the brain could be an indicator of structural brain changes.
Upon review of the MRI scans, researchers noted higher susceptibility values in certain areas of the brain in people recovering from COVID-19 infection compared to healthy participants. These areas included the frontal lobe and brain stem areas, which are connected to many of the symptoms people report experiencing (fatigue, anxiety, headaches, etc.). They also noted changes in areas of the brain stem that could affect things like circadian rhythm, which can have an impact on sleep patterns.
The research team is currently conducting a long-term study to better understand these brain changes and whether these changes may be permanent and what the implication of these permanent brain changes are.
