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Science News: COVID-19 can affect the brain (clots, degraded blood-brain barrier, inflammation)
Related: chronic viral sequelae, excitotoxin, inflammation, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
Not good news for me and many others recovering from Long Haul COVID.
TIP: COVID infection appears to be able to damage the blood-brain barrier. Don’t damage your brain irreperably— avoid excitotoxins like the poisons they are, since the blood-brain barrier may be partially “down” with COVID and its aftermath. And even when healthy, the blood-brain barrier does NOT totally reject excitotoxins. Make sure that magnesium (brain protective) supplementation is part of your care, ditto for other important nutrients.
Science News: COVID-19 can affect the brain. New clues hint at how
27 April 2021, emphasis added
For more than a year now, scientists have been racing to understand how the mysterious new virus that causes COVID-19 damages not only our bodies, but also our brains.
Early in the pandemic, some infected people noticed a curious symptom: the loss of smell. Reports of other brain-related symptoms followed: headaches, confusion, hallucinations and delirium. Some infections were accompanied by depression, anxiety and sleep problems.
Recent studies suggest that leaky blood vessels and inflammation are somehow involved in these symptoms. But many basic questions remain unanswered about the virus...
...
....suggests that the virus is affecting the brain in other ways, possibly involving blood vessels... Damage abounded, the team reported February 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Small clots sat in blood vessels. The walls of some vessels were unusually thick and inflamed. And blood was leaking out of the vessels into the surrounding brain tissue. “You can see all three things happening at the same time,” Nath says.
Those results suggest that clots, inflamed linings and leaks in the barriers that normally keep blood and other harmful substances out of the brain may all contribute to COVID-related brain damage.
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Inflamed body and brain
Inflammation in the body can cause trouble in the brain,... Inflammatory signals released after injury can change the way the brain makes and uses chemical signaling molecules, called neurotransmitters, that help nerve cells communicate.
...With these findings, it’s not clear that SARS-CoV-2 affects people’s brains differently from other viruses, says Navis. In her post–COVID-19 clinic at Mount Sinai, she sees patients with fatigue, headaches, numbness and dizziness — symptoms that are known to follow other viral infections, too. “I’m hesitant to say this is unique to COVID,” Navis says. “We’re just not used to seeing so many people getting one specific infection, or knowing what the viral infection is.”
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Lingering questions — what the virus actually does to the brain, who will suffer the most, and for how long — are still unanswered, and probably won’t be for a long time. The varied and damaging effects of lockdowns, the imprecision doctors and patients use for describing symptoms (such as the nonmedical term “brain fog”) and the indirect effects the virus can have on the brain all merge, creating a devilishly complex puzzle.
For now, doctors are busy focusing on ways in which they can help, even amid these mysteries, and designing larger, longer studies to better understand the effects of the virus on the brain.
WIND: good luck getting help from doctors—note the complete absence of even the thought that nutrition might be involved! You are the only person in the world who can heal yourself. It is extremely unlikely that a nutrition-ignorant allopathic medicine doctor will have a clue, let alone be able to help.
These speculations are consonant with all the things I’ve been saying for many months now: the Long Haul COVID issues appear to be (1) neurological, (2) inflammatory, (3) auto-immune (which leads to inflamation).
The referenced “fatigue , headaches” are distinctly “not me” symptoms new to me since infection, ditto for numbness in fingers at night sleeping on my side, and at times (now gone) a feeling like dizziness.
No wonder I’ve needed 12 hours of sleep a day all too frequently for the past year. I feel like such a loser having to go to bed at 8:30 PM and get up at 9-10 AM, so to speak. I’ve had to learn to accept that as a physical necessity for now.
