Does COVID-19 impact the brain?
Newly published @NatureMedicine
One year after hospitalisation with COVID-19, we tested cognition, scanned brains and took blood samples, here's what we found:
1/n
nature.com/articles/s4159…
Newly published @NatureMedicine
One year after hospitalisation with COVID-19, we tested cognition, scanned brains and took blood samples, here's what we found:
1/n
nature.com/articles/s4159…
https://twitter.com/gkwood3/status/1744650520420045219
1. Cognitive deficits one year after hospitalisation were equivalent in magnitude to *20 years* of normal brain ageing 
2. We identified global impairment across all cognitive domains in both accuracy AND response time
3. In blood, at one year, we found objective evidence of ongoing brain injury, even in those without neurological complications 🧠
4. In the COVID group, cognitive deficits were associated with symptoms of depression, increased multimorbidity, and a raised glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP). GFAP is a marker of astrocytic injury -> our brains immune cells
5. Cognitive deficits were associated with reduced grey matter volume, particularly in the anterior cingulate cortex -> this has functional roles in connecting cognition, attention, and emotion
6. There was a strong concordance between subjective and objective cognitive deficits. If patients were concerned about their memory, 9/10 had a cognitive test score below expected, and 6/10 had significant cognitive deficits
7. What's next? Mechanisms underpinning this potentially immune-mediated construct of depression, cognition and brain injury need to be further elucidated, to allow the development of targeted therapeutic interventions
8. Care needs to be taken in both inferring cause and effect, and extrapolating these results to a broader COVID-19 population. Crucially, participants in this study were hospitalised.
9. Thank you to all the @NIHRBioResource participants who made this research possible, alongside the @covidcns Consortia, and our funders @The_MRC . We were guided at each step by our PPI panel including @encephalitis @NeuroAlliance @TheStrokeAssoc @MQmentalhealth
10. A personal thanks to @NIHRresearch for supporting me as an ACF and to @LivHospitals, my clinical base, where we worked with PI @Sdefres1 to recruit patients locally for this study
10. Read our @LivUni news article here: news.liverpool.ac.uk/2024/09/24/lat…
It was a pleasure to work with @_brendan95 @psychgenomics @ProfHampshire @AlanCarson15 @ProfTonyDavid @Frosty_Immunity @Frankongho @Menon_Cambridge Ed Bullmore @bettyonthebrain @topherhuebel @RunningMadProf @John_PaulTaylor ...
@Tim_R_Nicholson @MasudHusain @MatthewHotopf @Cunningham_Colm @tompollak @rai_bethlehem @valegiunca @RachelUTG @fmrib_steve @fmrib_karla @BrainImagingLiv and many others
I would also like to thank @NeuroStaal Editor at @NatureMedicine, and the reviewers @MatiasGuiu and @nshejazi for their constructive and insightful feedback which we believe enhanced the work
Follow our @InfectNeuroLab led by @BenedictNeuro to hear about follow up work
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