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Covid May Cause Brain Damage that Increases Risk of Future Disease
In the brain tissue of Covid-19 patients who died, scientists found inflammation and damage that looked similar to effects from Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.
It can take years before scientists and physicians learn all the ways a new disease can affect people, both acutely while they have the disease and chronically with long-term issues that may not show up until years later. This reality has long been one of the concerns with Covid: Even in people with mild infections who fully recover, could there be lasting impacts on the heart, lungs or other organs that cause problems later, particularly given what we’ve already been learning about “long Covid”?
Unfortunately, evidence is building to say yes, though those issues won’t affect all people who had Covid, and we don’t yet know why they affect some people and not others. The most recent study to raise questions about long-term effects is one finding brain inflammation and other damage in the brain as a result of Covid-19 infection. The research raises far more questions than it answers.
