Long COVID causes loss of connections between neurons
For some people with COVID, symptoms persist for months or even years after the initial infection. This is often referred to as long covid brain fog. This will cause great pain to the patient. Because although the virus is hardly in the body, it has long-term sequelae.
During recovery from COVID-19, many patients say they experience "brain fog." According to the figures given in the research report, about 10% of patients infected with COVID-19 will experience long-term COVID. Currently, the medical community is accustomed to classifying the brain and neurological symptoms caused by COVID-19 infection as long-term COVID brain fog. According to statistics in the research report, up to 60% of long-term COVID patients experience some degree of brain fog.
Some people with long covid brain fog develop a variety of cognitive symptoms including effects on memory, concentration, sleep and speech. There is also growing concern over the finding that people with COVID are at increased risk of developing brain diseases such as dementia.
Scientists are trying to understand exactly how COVID infection affects the human brain. But it's hard to study because we can't do experiments on the brains of living people. One way to address this problem is to create organoids, which are miniature organs grown from stem cells. In a recent study, we created brain organoids slightly larger than a pinhead and infected them with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
In these organoids, we found that too many synapses were eliminated, more than you would expect to see in a normal brain. Synapses are important because they allow neurons to communicate with each other. Still, eliminating a certain number of inactive synapses is part of normal brain function. When no longer needed, the brain essentially sheds old connections and makes way for new ones, allowing for more efficient function.
One of the key functions of the brain's immune cells, or microglia, is to prune these inactive synapses. The excessive elimination of synapses that we saw in our model of COVID infection could explain why some people develop brain fog post covid during prolonged COVID.
similar to neurodegenerative diseases
This pruning process is thought to go awry in several diseases that affect the brain. In particular, excessive elimination of synapses has recently been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders such as schizophrenia and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
By sequencing the RNA of individual cells, we can study how different cell types in organoids respond to the virus. We found that in our COVID-infected organoids, the pattern of genes that are turned on and off by microglia mimics changes seen in neurodegenerative diseases. This may go some way to explain the link between COVID and the risk of certain neurological diseases.
possible therapeutic target
A limitation of our study is that our organoid models closely resemble fetal or early brains rather than adult brains. So we can't be sure that the changes we noticed in our study are necessarily reflected in the adult brain.
If this proves to be a fruitful investigation, we believe our findings may point to a mechanism responsible for the persistence of cognitive symptoms following COVID and other viral infections that affect the brain. SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, and a similar process has been observed in mice infected with other RNA viruses, such as West Nile virus, which may also lead to residual cognitive symptoms.
From here we want to investigate how different drugs suppress the changes we see in infected models, hopefully paving the way for effective treatments. In other studies, we have observed that an antibiotic called minocycline reduces the extent to which microglia prune synapses in a dish. So we wanted to see if this drug could help us model brain organoids after SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Disease treatment is a very complicated and professional matter. Due to limitations, the Dragon Crown Care Center can only conduct simple remote interviews, and cannot conduct face-to-face offline interviews, and cannot obtain comprehensive medical examination results. Therefore, the suggestions, guidance, plans and documents conveyed by longcovidcarecenter to patients can only be used as a reference for patients to understand their own diseases in many aspects, and cannot be directly used as treatment plans. Patients must discuss their symptoms with a doctor at a local hospital through face-to-face communication. After completing the physical examination required by the doctor, the patient receives a prescription issued by the doctor and undergoes treatment under the guidance of the doctor.
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