Brain's frontal lobes can experience interruptions in electrical activity due to COVID-19 infection.
Have you been experiencing weird brain symptoms alongside your COVID-19 infection? Well, you're not alone. Research suggests that electronic brain activity tests, like EEG, show common abnormalities in patients with neurological symptoms related to the virus. Let's dive into this intriguing topic.
Brain Funk and COVID-19
You might have heard about long COVID, affecting people long after they've supposedly recovered. One of the lasting issues some people experience is brain fog. Recently, a study showcased that people who claimed to have had COVID performed worse on a cognitive test than those who didn't believe they contracted the virus.
The research doesn't definitively prove that the infection causes long-term cognitive decline but does highlight concerns about potential brain-related complications. With the EEG abnormalities linked to COVID-19 neurological symptoms, these concerns are even more pronounced.
"These findings indicate that there might be long-term issues," says Dr. Zulfi Haneef, assistant professor of neurology/neurophysiology at Baylor College of Medicine.
On the bright side, approximately 56.8% of patients showed improvements after follow-up EEG tests.
Brain Anomalies and COVID-19
Around a third of EEG abnormalities were in the frontal lobe of the brain. Dr. Haneef suggests a probable connection between the virus's likely entry point—the nose—and the frontal lobe's location nearby. He recommends exploring EEG tests and other brain imaging techniques, like MRI or CT scans, to gain a closer look at the frontal lobe.
The team acknowledges that the virus may not directly cause all the damage observed. Systemic effects of the infection, such as inflammation, low oxygen levels, unusual blood properties, and cardiac arrest, may also contribute to EEG abnormalities.
Besides frontal lobe issues, the analysis revealed "diffuse slowing" in the background electrical activity of the whole brain in nearly 70% of patients.
Various Limitations and Considerations
The study did have some limitations. For instance, the team didn't always have access to raw data from individual studies, and EEG traces were often omitted during doctors' reporting. Additionally, doctors might have given anti-seizure medications to patients suspected of having seizures, which could have potentially obscured signs of seizures in their EEG traces.
While more research is warranted to better understand the exact prevalence of EEG abnormalities in patients with COVID-19, current indications point towards a potential correlation between neurological symptoms and brain-related complications. Stay tuned for the latest updates on the novel coronavirus and COVID-19.
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