MedPageToday Brain inflammation may not be a cause of long COVID cognitive problems.
Spinal fluid immune profiles were largely normal in people with neurologic long COVID symptoms in a case-control study, suggesting brain inflammation was not a cause of long COVID cognitive symptoms.
In 37 people with post-COVID neuropsychiatric conditions — most commonly, brain fog — there was no evidence of abnormal cytokines in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) or blood-brain barrier dysfunction, reported Shelli Farhadian, MD, PhD, of the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and co-authors in a research letter published in JAMA Network Open
“Our results indicate that neuroinflammation and blood-brain barrier dysfunction are unlikely to be drivers of neuropsychiatric symptoms after COVID-19, and that interventions aimed at quieting brain inflammation likely won’t help people with post-COVID conditions,” Farhadian told MedPage Today.
“We’ve previously found, through our studies of chronic HIV infection and other diseases, that many CSF cytokines are abnormally high in people with infections affecting the brain, and others have shown that they are also abnormally high during other neuroinflammatory diseases,” she noted.
“After 3 years, we still don’t understand why some people experience symptoms after having COVID,” Farhadian said.