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Study suggests COVID-19 harms parts of the brain, even in mild cases - The Boston Globe
Jun 21, 2021 1 min, 12 secs
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the stranger symptoms of COVID-19 has been a loss of smell, taste, or both.

Now, a study of brain scans of people who have had the disease offers new clues in the mystery.

Researchers from Oxford University said they had found that people who had COVID-19 had a “loss of grey matter” in areas of the brain related to smell and taste.

A review of hundreds of brain scans revealed “a significant, deleterious impact of COVID-19 on the olfactory and gustatory cortical systems,” the study said.

The researchers scrutinized before-and-after brain scans collected on average three years apart from 782 people as part of the UK Biobank project.

The study group included 394 people who had gotten COVID-19 by the time of their second scan and 388 people who hadn’t.

The researchers said among those study participants who had gotten sick, a high number had mild cases.

He said it appeared to provide “good evidence that infections lead to neurologic damage in some portion of people.”.

He also said the researchers should have inquired whether the study participants had experienced loss of smell, taste, or both, which would have allowed them to compare symptoms with the changes found on the brain scans.

People who lose their sense of smell and taste fall into two groups, he said

It’s still too early to tell what percentage of people will develop permanent loss, he said

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