Severe Covid infections can inflame brain’s ‘control centre’, the brainstem, that governs functions such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, finds brain scans of people hospitalised with Covid, which may explain the long-term breathlessness and fatigue some long COVID patients experience.

I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awae215/7811070

From the linked article:

Severe Covid infections can inflame brain’s ‘control centre’, research says

Scans of people hospitalised with Covid may explain the long-term breathlessness and fatigue some patients experience

Severe Covid infections can drive inflammation in the brain’s “control centre”, researchers say, leading to damage that may explain the long-term breathlessness, fatigue and anxiety some patients experience.

High-resolution MRI scans of 30 people hospitalised with Covid early in the pandemic, before the introduction of vaccines, found signs of inflammation in the brainstem, a small but critical structure that governs life-sustaining bodily functions such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.

The scans suggest that severe Covid infections can provoke an immune reaction which inflames the brainstem, with the resulting damage producing symptoms that can last for months after patients have been discharged.

Rua and her colleagues used powerful 7 Tesla MRI scanners to image the patients’ brains. These revealed enough detail to see inflammation and microstructural abnormalities in the brainstem tissue. All of the patients had been admitted to hospital with severe Covid near the start of the pandemic.

The scans highlighted abnormalities linked to inflammation in multiple parts of the brainstem, starting several weeks after patients were admitted to hospital. The damage was still evident in scans more than six months later.

Damage to the brainstem might also contribute to the mental health problems some patients face after Covid infection. Of the patients in the study, those with the highest levels of brainstem inflammation had the most severe physical symptoms and the highest levels of depression and anxiety, according to the study published in Brain.