For some people with COVID, symptoms persist for months or even years after the initial infection. This is often referred to as long COVID. Some people with long-term COVID complain of cerebral palsy, which includes post covid brain symptoms that affect memory, concentration, sleep, and speech. There is also growing concern over the finding that people with COVID are at increased risk of brain disease.

So, how exactly does COVID infection affect the human brain. At LongCovidCareCenter we seem to have a better understanding. Virus particles were not found in the brains of these rhesus monkeys because SARS-CoV-2 proteins were detected in only a very small number of cells, and efficient replication in vitro did not appear to occur in cell lines associated with the central nervous system (CNS) .

The researchers concluded that SARS-CoV-2 inside the CNS cannot effectively infect and replicate, and the pathological damage is caused by CNS cytokines or systemic inflammation. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 replicates and infects inefficiently in the central nervous system (CNS) may also explain why SARS-CoV-2 has gained controversy when detected in the brain and cerebrospinal fluid of postmortem COVID-19 patients. In other words, sometimes viral gene fragments were detected and sometimes no viral gene fragments were detected.

In How Long Will Symptoms Of Brain Fog Last After Being Infected With Covid-19?, HIA mentions more about the pathological causes of brain fog symptoms after infection with Covid-19, which is very detailed, whether you are a professional or a non-professional, All can have a clearer understanding of long covid brain fog.

Synapses are important because they allow neurons to communicate with each other. Still, eliminating a certain number of inactive synapses is part of normal brain function. When no longer needed, the brain essentially sheds old connections and makes way for new ones, allowing for more efficient function. One of the key functions of the brain's immune cells, or microglia, is to prune these inactive synapses.

Why some people develop cognitive symptoms during prolonged COVID

Similar to neurodegenerative diseases. Interestingly, this pruning process is thought to go awry in several diseases that affect the brain. In particular, excessive elimination of synapses has recently been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders such as schizophrenia and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

By sequencing the RNA of individual cells, we can study how different cell types in organoids respond to the virus. We found that in our COVID-infected organoids, the pattern of genes that are turned on and off by microglia mimics changes seen in neurodegenerative diseases. This may go some way to explaining the link between COVID and the risk of certain neurological diseases.

Possible therapeutic target

Several post-mortem and imaging studies have reported neuronal death and reduced gray matter thickness in COVID patients, suggesting a similar pattern of synaptic loss from infection in adults. If this proves to be a fruitful investigation, we believe our findings may point to a mechanism responsible for the persistence of cognitive symptoms following COVID and other viral infections that affect the brain.

From here we want to investigate how different drugs suppress the changes we see in infected models, hopefully paving the way for effective treatments. In other studies, we have observed that an antibiotic called minocycline reduces the extent to which microglia prune synapses in a dish.

For patients, you can seek corresponding long covid brain fog treatment from LongCovidCareCenter, so as to get rid of brain fog as soon as possible. This is also the wish of most post covid fog patients, and I hope it will be effective.