Covid effects on brain - Interesting but very concerning findings.

[Farooqji]

There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism, or of neuroinflammation following viral infection. Most brain imaging studies have focused on qualitative, gross pathology in moderate to severe cases, most typically carried out on hospitalised patients. It remains unknown however whether the impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection can be detected in milder cases, in a quantitative and automated manner, and whether this can reveal possible mechanisms for the spread of the disease. UK Biobank scanned over 40,000 participants before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, making it possible in 2021 to invite back hundreds of previously-imaged participants for a second imaging visit. Here, we studied the possible brain changes associated with the coronavirus infection using multimodal MRI data from 785 adult participants (aged 51–81) from the UK Biobank COVID-19 re-imaging study, including 401 adult participants who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection between their two scans. We used structural, diffusion and functional brain scans from before and after infection, to compare longitudinal changes between these 401 SARS-CoV-2 cases and 384 controls who had either tested negative to rapid antibody testing or had no COVID-19 medical and public health record, and who were matched to the cases for age, sex, ethnicity and interval between scans. The controls and cases did not differ in blood pressure, body mass index, diabetes diagnosis, smoking, alcohol consumption, or socio-economic status. Using both hypothesis-driven and exploratory approaches, with false discovery rate multiple comparison correction, we identified respectively 68 and 67 significant longitudinal effects associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in the brain

medrxiv.org/content/10.1101...