Had COVID? Part of the Virus May Stick Around in Your Brain

If you or someone you know is experiencing "brain fog" after COVID-19, scientists now have a possible explanation — and it might not bring much comfort.

Researchers in Germany found that part of the virus, the spike protein, remains in the brain long after the virus clears out.

 

These investigators discovered the spike protein from the virus in brain tissue of animals and people after death. The finding suggests these virus fragments build up, stick around, and trigger inflammation that causes long COVID symptoms.

About 15% of COVID patients continue to have long-term effects of the infection despite their recovery, said senior study author Ali Ertürk, PhD, director of the Institute for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at the Helmholtz Center Munich in Germany.

 

Reported neurological problems include brain fog, brain tissue loss, a decline in thinking abilities, and problems with memory, he said.

"These symptoms clearly suggest damages and long-term changes caused by SARS-CoV-2 in the brain, the exact molecular mechanisms of which are still poorly understood," Ertürk said.

 

The researchers also propose a way the spike protein can get into the brain in their preprint report published online before peer review April 5 on bioRxiv.

Delivered by circulating blood, the spike protein can stay inside small openings in the bone marrow of the skull called niches. It can also reside in the meninges, thin layers of cells that act as a buffer between the skull and the brain. From there, one theory goes, the spike protein uses channels to enter the brain itself.

The hope is researchers can develop treatments that block one or more steps in this process and help people avoid long COVID brain issues.

 

'Very Concerning'

"This is a very concerning report that literally demonstrates the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the skull-meninges-brain axis in postmortem individuals," said Eric Topol, MD, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, CA, and editor-in-chief of Medscape, WebMD's sister site for medical professionals.

Having the spike protein accumulate in structures right outside the brain and causing ongoing inflammation makes sense to Topol. The clustering of spike proteins would trigger an immune response from this niche reservoir of immune cells that cause the inflammation associated with long COVID and the symptoms such as brain fog, he said.

 

Problems with thinking and memory after COVID infection are relatively common. One research team found 22% of people with long COVID specifically reported this issue, on average, across 43 published studies. Even people who had mild COVID illness can develop brain fog later, Ertürk and colleagues note.

 

So why are researchers blaming the spike protein and not the whole COVID virus? As part of the study, they found SARS-CoV-2 virus RNA in some people after death and not in others, suggesting the virus does not need to be there to trigger brain fog. They also injected the spike protein directly into the brains of mice and showed it can cause cells to die.

Researchers also found no SARS-CoV-2 virus in the brain parenchyma, the functional tissue in the brain containing nerve cells and non-nerve (called glial) cells, but they did detect the spike protein there.

Surprising Findings

Investigators were surprised to find spike protein in the skull niches of people who survived COVID and died later from another cause. Ertürk, lead author and PhD student Zhouyi Rong, and their colleagues found spike protein in 10 of 34 skulls from people who died from non-COVID causes in 2021 and 2022.

 

They also found COVID can change how proteins act in and around the brain. Some of these proteins are linked to Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, but have never before been linked to the virus

Another unexpected finding was how close the findings were in mice and humans. There was a "remarkable similarity of distribution of the viral spike protein and dysregulated proteins identified in the mouse and human samples," Ertürk said.

Future Treatments?

Tests for protein changes in the skull or meninges would be invasive but possible compared to sampling the parenchyma inside the brain. Even less invasive would be testing blood samples for altered proteins that could identify people most at risk of developing brain complications after COVID illness.

It will take more brain science to get there. "Designing treatment strategies for these neurological symptoms requires an in-depth knowledge of molecules dysregulated by the virus in the brain tissues," Ertürk said.

New COVID Variant on WHO's Radar Causing Itchy Eyes in Kids - Times of India

A new COVID-19 variant that recently landed on the World Health Organization's radar may cause previously unseen symptoms in children, according to a new report. 

While the variant, called "Arcturus," hasn't yet made the CDC's watchlist, a prominent pediatrician in India is seeing children with "itchy" or "sticky" eyes, as if they have conjunctivitis or pinkeye, according to  The Times of India. 

The new itchy eye symptom is in addition to kids having a high fever and cough, Vipin Vashishtha, MD, said on Twitter, noting that pediatric COVID cases have picked up there for the first time in 6 months.

The country has also seen a rise in another virus among children with similar symptoms, called adenovirus. COVID and adenovirus cannot be distinguished without testing, and many parents don't want to have their children tested because the swabs are uncomfortable, The Times of India reported. One doctor told the newspaper that among every 10 kids with COVID-like symptoms, two or three of them had tested positive on a COVID test taken at home.

Health officials in India are doing mock drills this week to check how prepared the country's hospitals are as India sees cases rise, the BBC reported. India struggled during a COVID-19 surge in 2021, at which time sickened people were seen lying on sidewalks outside overflowing hospitals, and reports surfaced of a black market for private citizens to buy oxygen. 

Arcturus (formally, Omicron subvariant XBB.1.16) made news 2 weeks ago as it landed on the WHO's radar after surfacing in India. A WHO official called it "one to watch." The Times of India reported that 234 new cases of XBB.1.16 were included in the country's latest 5,676 new infections, meaning the subvariant accounts for 4% of new COVID cases.

ABOUT A THOUSAND AMERICANS ARE DYING EVERY DAY — A TOLL SO GRIM THAT IT'S HARD TO COMPREHEND.

Leaked documents dated to earlier this week, obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by Yahoo News, warn that new coronavirus cases are spiking again as Americans relax their social distancing practices.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s top infectious disease expert and a national figurehead against the virus, lamented this week that the outbreak has become his “worse nightmare.”

“In a period of four months, it has devastated the whole world,” he said. “And it isn’t over yet.”

Does that amount to the widely-feared “second wave” of COVID, which could lead to more mass deaths and knock down an economy that’s only starting to recover? It remains unclear — especially because the fight against the virus is going very differently in different areas of the country.

Atlantic writer James Hamblin, whose early warnings about the severity of the pandemic proved prescient, pushed back against the idea that the U.S. is experiencing a second wave. It would be more accurate, he said yesterday, to characterize COVID cases in the U.S. as “one long wave” that’s leveled out around 20,000 new cases — and, chillingly, around 1,000 deaths — per day.

CHINESE COVID-19 VACCINE EFFECTIVE IN MONKEYS

Researchers at Beijing pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech have developed an experimental COVID-19 vaccine that it says protected macaques from infection, ScienceMagazine reports.

The vaccine was based on a tried-and-true formulation that included an inactivated version of the virus SARS-CoV-2, as detailed in a preprint uploaded to the server bioRxiv on April 19.

“These data support the rapid clinical development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for humans,” reads the paper.

The team at Sinovac injected eight macaque monkeys with two different doses. Three weeks after injection, they introduced the coronavirus straight into the money’s lungs. There were reportedly no side effects.

None of the monkeys developed an infection beyond a small “viral blip.” A less fortunate control group of monkeys developed severe pneumonia after being infected by the virus.

“This is old school but it might work,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-authored a status report on COVID vaccine candidates, told Science Mag. “What I like most is that many vaccine producers, also in lower–middle-income countries, could make such a vaccine.”

Critics say, though, that the sample size in Sinovac’s trial was too small to produce generalizable results. Questions also remain about the viability of the vaccine candidate for use in humans — especially considering that monkeys don’t experience the same severe symptoms of COVID as humans.

In a separate Sinovac experiment, the researchers mixed a cocktail of antibodies from patients in China, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom with the virus.

According to the team, the antibodies “potently neutralized 10 representative SARS-CoV-2 strains, indicative of a possible broader neutralizing ability.”

And that’d be good news.

“This provides strong evidence that the virus is not mutating in a way that would make it resistant to a #COVID19 vaccine,” tweeted of Oregon Health & Science University immunologist Mark Slifka on Wednesday.

Sinovac Biotech is now planning trials on thousands of human subjects.

THESE ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF CORONAVIRUS

As the deadly coronavirus 2019-nCoV spreads throughout the world, doctors are getting a better understanding of what symptoms and warning signs to keep an eye out for.

Some extreme cases involve patients coughing up blood or going into septic shock.  More typically, however, symptoms remain milder — potentially letting some cases slip under the radar and worsening the outbreak.

Like other coronaviruses, 2019-nCoV can cause pneumonia and other respiratory and cardiovascular conditions: coughing, fever, fatigue, and soreness. Because the outbreak is in the middle of flu season, that can make distinguishing between the two difficult.

As the disease progresses, it can cause more severe symptoms including difficulty breathing, kidney injury, and heart damage.

The virus is most dangerous for the elderly or people who are already sick — the mortality rate is substantially higher within those particular groups than the general population.

Screening for new cases is also difficult because 2019-nCoV patients can spread the disease while they remain asymptomatic for as long as two weeks — compared to most viral infections which cause symptoms within the first few days.

As 2019-nCoV, the coronavirus that emerged in China last month, continues to spread to over a dozen countries, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the elderly and chronically ill are at a greater risk than the general population.

The coronavirus can cause symptoms ranging in severity from fever and fatigue to pneumonia and septic shock. But older people, and people who were already sick before contracting 2019-nCoV, seem to be getting hit harder,