Wave of COVID-related brain damage imminent: Study

LONDON: Scientists warned, on Wednesday, July 8, that the world could potentially witness a new wave of coronavirus related brain damage as new evidence suggested COVID-19 can lead to severe neurological complications including inflammation, psychosis and delirium.

This comes after a study by researchers at University College London (UCL) described 43 cases of patients with COVID-19 who suffered either temporary brain dysfunction, strokes, nerve damage or other serious brain effects. The research adds to recent studies which also found the disease can damage the brain.

Michael Zandi, from UCL’s Institute of Neurology, who co-led the study said, “Whether we will see an epidemic on a large scale of brain damage linked to the pandemic perhaps similar to the encephalitis lethargica outbreak in the 1920s and 1930s after the 1918 influenza pandemic remains to be seen.”

According to neuroscientists and specialist brain doctors, emerging evidence of coronavirus’ impact on the human brain is concerning. “My worry is that we have millions of people with COVID-19 now. And if in a year’s time we have 10 million recovered people, and those people have cognitive deficits … then that’s going to affect their ability to work and their ability to go about activities of daily living,” Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at Western University in Canada, told Reuters in an interview.

Published in the journal “Brain”, the UCL study stated that nine patients who had brain inflammation were diagnosed with a rare condition called acute disemminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) which is more usually seen in children and can be triggered by viral infections.

The team noticed about one person per month who was suffering with ADEM visited their specialist clinic in London before the spread of the pandemic. However, this number rose to one patient every week during the ‘study period’ which they described as a ‘concerning increase’.

Ross Paterson, who co-led the study, said that since COVID-19 has only been around for a couple of months, its long terms effects cannot be deciphered yet. Thus, doctors need to be aware of possible neurological effects, as early diagnosis in these cases can improve the disease outcomes. The growing evidence also highlights the need for large, detailed studies and global data collection to assess how common such neurological and psychiatric complications were.