The mystery of how SARS-CoV-2 may cause brain fog or other neurological symptoms in some people is driving new global research.
Why it matters: Roughly 79 million Americans contracted COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic. While most survived, many are grappling with long-term symptoms, or long COVID, that affect the brain and other body systems.
- "Neuro-long COVID is a very important problem in the U.S. It affects millions of people and leads to people not being able to work the way they used to, or to lose time from work," Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, tells Axios.
- There's an "urgent need" to research the disorders and develop therapies, NIH's Avindra Nath and Yale's Serena Spudich wrote in a January Science perspective.
- "It's the third-most frequent neurological condition in the U.S. today," says Koralnik, who started a long COVID clinic in May 2020 that's treated about 1,200 patients.
How it works
Some of the big questions researchers are trying to answer: if and how the virus is breaching the protective blood-brain barrier, how it is damaging the brain, and if the effect is permanent.
- Most of the accumulated data so far is based on adults, so there's less known about how the virus affects the brains of older teens or children and infants.
Accessing the brain: The blood-brain barrier often prevents many germs from reaching the brain, but certain pathogens are able to breach it....
- Whether SARS-CoV-2 has the ability to