COVID-19’s Severe Impacts on the Brain – Even in People That Did Not Experience

CT brain scan.

Tracy Fischer, PhD, lead investigator and associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the Tulane National Primate Research Center. Credit: Tulane University, Paula Burch-Celentano

Tracy Fischer, PhD, lead investigator and associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the Tulane National Primate Research Center, has been studying brains for decades. Soon after the primate center launched its COVID-19 pilot program in the spring of 2020, she began studying the brain tissue of several subjects that had been infected.

Fischer’s initial findings documenting the extent of damage seen in the brain due to SARS-CoV-2 infection were so striking that she spent the next year further refining the study controls to ensure that the results were clearly attributable to the infection.

“Because the subjects didn’t experience significant respiratory symptoms, no one expected them to have the severity of disease that we found in the brain,” Fischer said. “But the findings were distinct and profound, and undeniably a result of the infection.”

The findings are also consistent with autopsy studies of people who have died of COVID-19, suggesting that nonhuman primates may serve as an appropriate model, or proxy, for how humans experience the disease.

Neurological complications are often among the first symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection and can be the most severe and persistent. They also affect people indiscriminately —all ages, with and without comorbidities, and with varying degrees of disease severity.

Fischer hopes that this and future studies that investigate how SARS-CoV-2 affects the brain will contribute to the understanding and treatment of patients suffering from the neurological consequences of COVID-19 and long COVID.

Reference: “Neuropathology and virus in brain of SARS-CoV-2 infected non-human primate” 1 April 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29440-z

The COVID-19 pilot research program at the Tulane National Primate Research Center was supported by funds made possible by the National Institutes of Health Office of Research Infrastructure Program, Tulane University and Fast Grants.