Recovering Covid patients around the world have reported several persistent neurological symptoms, including fatigue, memory loss and confusion, dubbed ‘brain fog’ or ‘Covid brain’. Scientists may now have found the culprit.
“We were initially approached by our intensive care colleagues, who observed severe delirium in many patients hospitalized with Covid-19,” says neuro-oncologist Jessica Wilcox of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
His team’s initial investigations ended up turning into a snowball in a multidisciplinary collaboration between neurology, intensive care, microbiology and neuroradiology specialists to discover the root cause of this ‘brain fog’.
The researchers examined the cerebrospinal fluid of 18 cancer patients who experienced some form of neurological deficiency after contracting Covid-19.
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Some degree of ongoing viral infection was initially suspected, but disregarded after the microbiological analysis revealed that the patients had actually recovered from the disease and no longer had the virus in the spinal fluid.
What they found in the fluid, however, can provide information about some of the most debilitating symptoms of the so-called ‘long Covid’.
“We found that these patients had persistent inflammation and high levels of cytokines in the cerebrospinal fluid, which explained the symptoms they were experiencing.” says the study’s co-first author, Jan Remsik.
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Cytokines are messenger proteins of the immune system. They can be triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and led to a frenzy known as a potentially fatal “cytokine storm” of excessive inflammation. Cytokine storms were responsible for the most serious cases of Covid-19 witnessed in ICUs worldwide.
A similar phenomenon has been witnessed in patients undergoing certain types of immunotherapy treatments, such as cancer, with the suspicion that cytokines somehow reach the brain, causing a series of neurological symptoms similar to those found in the ‘Covid brain’ .
Although more studies are needed, initial research suggests that additional treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs may relieve ‘brain fog’ in post-Covid patients. The suggestion is that the nervous and immune systems may be more interconnected than previously thought.
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