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Even Mild COVID-19 Can Affect The Brain, And We Don't Know How Long It Lasts - ScienceAlert
Sep 26, 2021 1 min, 18 secs

In August 2021, a preliminary but large-scale study investigating brain changes in people who had experienced COVID-19 drew a great deal of attention within the neuroscience community.

They compared people who had experienced COVID-19 to participants who had not, carefully matching the groups based on age, sex, baseline test date and study location, as well as common risk factors for disease, such as health variables and socioeconomic status.

Specifically, the thickness of the gray matter tissue in brain regions known as the frontal and temporal lobes was reduced in the COVID-19 group, differing from the typical patterns seen in the group that hadn't experienced COVID-19.

In the general population, it is normal to see some change in gray matter volume or thickness over time as people age, but the changes were larger than normal in those who had been infected with COVID-19.

That is, people who had been infected with COVID-19 showed a loss of brain volume even when the disease was not severe enough to require hospitalization.

Early on in the pandemic, one of the most common reports from those infected with COVID-19 was the loss of sense of taste and smell.

While it is far too early to draw any conclusions about the long-term impacts of these COVID-related changes, investigating possible connections between COVID-19-related brain changes and memory is of great interest – particularly given the regions implicated and their importance in memory and Alzheimer's disease.

These new findings bring about important yet unanswered questions: What do these brain changes following COVID-19 mean for the process and pace of aging?

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