Scientists warn of potential wave of covid-linked brain damage

[Redolent]

A study by researchers at University College London (UCL)described 43 cases of patients with COVID-19 who suffered either temporary brain dysfunction, strokes, nerve damage or other serious brain effects.

“We’re seeing things in the way Covid-19 affects the brain that we haven’t seen before with other viruses,” said Michael Zandi, a senior author on the study and a consultant at the institute and University College London Hospitals NHS foundation trust.

“What we’ve seen with some of these Adem patients, and in other patients, is you can have severe neurology, you can be quite sick, but actually have trivial lung disease,” he added.

In the UCL study, published in the journal Brain, nine patients who had brain inflammation were diagnosed with a rare condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) which is more usually seen in children and can be triggered by viral infections.

The team said it would normally see about one adult patient with ADEM per month at their specialist London clinic, but this had risen to at least one a week during the study period, something they described as “a concerning increase”.

“My worry is that we have millions of people with COVID-19 now. And if in a year’s time we have 10 million recovered people, and those people have cognitive deficits ... then that’s going to affect their ability to work and their ability to go about activities of daily living,” Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at Western University in Canada, told Reuters in an interview.

'Possibly' being the key word.

If they were already seeing one a month linked to another virus and now they are seeing one a week.. Is that not quite a proportionate rise considering millions have just been infected with the same virus in a very short space of time, which never happens at any other time?

Every disease viral or bacterial carries a risk of long term complications. How is this suddenly news....oh that's right nothing else existed before Covid

@0963158b are you medical if you don’t mind me asking? I ask because I find it interesting that few doctors are prepared to dismiss COVID as “nothing to worry about, get on with it” the way others are. Which leads me to believe that the more you know about it the worse it looks.
And yes, of course I agree with you. If the specialists are concerned, I am concerned.

Having had long term complications from Epstein Barr I'm still glad I didn't live my life fearing it.
We might have to give up kissing soon too it seems to be certain we don't get Alzheimer's? www.statnews.com/2020/05/06/researchers-show-herpes-link-to-alzheimers/

Why are diseases like polio & toxoplasmosis bring brought into this discussion? We know lots of other viral/bacterial infections can have horrific complications, no one is disputing that. But with polio & esp toxoplasmosis the number of cases is so small - with Covid we’re talking 12 million cases in 6 months & accelerating. Even if only a small proportion end up with severe brain damage, we’re talking a lot of people. Then there are the strokes, heart, lung & kidney damage. And yes, flu & other viral infections also cause complications to other organs but we understand flu, it’s a well researched illness & there’s a vaccination programme. We are only at the beginning of understanding this disease.

Does Boris have this, or was he always like that?

@YangShanPo

Does Boris have this, or was he always like that?

🤣🤣 Brilliant

Nah, Boris is just a long term sufferer from over promotion. It’s very contagious, because most of his cabinet have it.

Thousands of people have devastating long term illness from ‘just’ flu in the form of post viral chronic fatigue syndrome/ ME.

earl

I'm not medical. I'm an academic from a family of academics who lost someone to ADEM. As you can imagine, we researched relentlessly. The best case scenarios made for harrowing reading. We desperately wanted to think it didn't have to be that bad. ADEM can, and often is, devastating. The cost of care is unbelievably high. I cannot think of another disease that so swiftly destroys the brain, sometimes in days. There is nothing about the body or the mind it can't touch.

If COVID-19 is more likely to trigger this condition than other coronaviruses, it is unbelievably bad news for those with a genetic vulnerability to ADEM, for the NHS and for our social care systems. We know very little about why ADEM hits so it's not possible to protect this group.

There are two problems. There is Covid, which can kill you or usually not. And then there is the way it can trigger your own immune system to kill you or destroy your brain function. I don't think the person who wrote Time times article really grasped the difference. We need to know more about the latter.

We need to know more about whether the rise in cases of ADEM is greater than it would be if, say, this many extra people had got flu this year. The fact that specialists have made this report and presented it in this manner (and what we know about how Covid aggravates the immune system) doesn't seem terribly good.

0963158b thank you for the background, and I’m so sorry for your loss. What a terrible thing to go through.
I’m probably going to be called a dementor, but I’m concerned that we are rushing headlong into a disaster with the way so many people are dismissing this virus as a nothing.