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on Monday, shedding light on what could be behind the lingering symptoms of long Covid and common symptoms associated with infection like the loss of smell and taste.Brain scans taken before and after a coronavirus infection revealed “significant” brain changes, according to a U.K. study involving 785 people aged 51–81, 401 of whom tested positive for Covid.
The scans, taken an average 34 months apart and 141 days after diagnosis with Covid-19 as part of the U.K. Biobank study, revealed evidence of tissue damage in regions associated with smell and memory, an overall reduction in brain size and structural changes to parts of the brain associated with information processing and cognitive skills.
The infected participants also showed a “significantly greater cognitive decline” between their two scans than those who did not test positive, the researchers found, which is associated with damage to the cerebellum, a brain region linked to cognition. Most people in the study experienced mild Covid infections—just 15 were hospitalized—and the researchers found the changes to cognition and the brain after infection were still significant after hospitalized participants had been excluded from the analysis.
That finding is important, the researchers said, as most of the brain-related studies of Covid-19 to date have focused on hospitalized patients with severe disease.Whether the brain changes are permanent. While the study found no link between brain deterioration, time between infection and the second brain scan, the researchers said the study’s timeframe meant less than 20% of participants had tested positive more than six months ago.
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