Thread by @opinion

Recent research on the health effects of Covid-19 found that even mild cases could cause significant changes to the brain.

That makes “living with Covid” a risky and dangerous strategy trib.al/5xXxnGm

The @uk_biobank project involves half a million adults ranging in age from 40 to 69. They’ve collected:

🩸Blood samples
⚕️Detailed health info
🧠Thousands of scans & brain images

It's one of the most rigorous analyses of the effects of Covid on the brain trib.al/5xXxnGm

What makes the data unique is that they compare brain images before and after a Covid infection in the same people.

Even mild cases of Covid led to loss of volume in certain areas of the brain, specifically those involved in processing smell and taste trib.al/5xXxnGm

But they also found statistically significant brain volume loss in the gray matter in other areas involved with memory formation.

Authors speculate that even mild Covid cases might have deleterious effects that may last long past the period of infection trib.al/5xXxnGm

This kind of “longitudinal” analysis allowed them to discover something else they might not have otherwise: people who were diagnosed with Covid had a smaller thalamus to begin with than those who did not trib.al/5xXxnGm

Is this finding unique to Covid, or has it been found in other viral diseases?

There are other viruses that infect the nervous system, such as measles, HIV, herpes and polio, and as we know these can have dire consequences trib.al/5xXxnGm

The only other common respiratory virus that can infect the brain, aside from coronoviruses, is the respiratory syncytial virus.

But these mostly manifest as seizures and brain inflammation trib.al/5xXxnGm

Volume changes are only one of the potential brain conditions caused by Covid. There's increased risk of:

➡️Seizures
➡️Strokes
➡️Guillain-Barre syndrome

But brain volume loss is a significantly bigger problem since it happens in even mild cases of Covid trib.al/5xXxnGm

If even mild cases cause issues that store up real morbidity for the future, then we should continue to be obsessed with crushing even mild cases of Covid.

Given the unknowns, we should aim to get as close to zero cases as possible trib.al/5xXxnGm