A Growing Litany of Serious Woes Post-COVID

Feixiong Cheng, Ph.D.  Cleveland Clinic

"Identifying how COVID-19 and neurological problems are linked will be critical for developing effective preventive and therapeutic strategies to address the surge in neurocognitive impairments that we expect to see in the near future."

"While some studies suggest that SARS-CoV-02 infects brain cells directly, others found no evidence of the virus in the brain."

"We discovered that SARS-CoV-2 infection significantly altered Alzheimer's markers implicated in brain inflammation and that certain viral entry factors are highly expressed in cells in the blood-brain barrier."

"These findings indicate that the virus may impact several genes or pathways involved in neuroinflammation and brain microvascular injury, which could lead to Alzheimer's disease-like cognitive impairment."

"Ultimately, we hope to have paved the way for research that leads to testable and measurable biomarkers that can identify patients at the highest risk for neurological complications with COVID-19."

Feixlong Cheng, researcher, Genomic Medicine Institute, Cleveland Clinic

"It's a kind of mental cloudiness -- like you're in a daze."

"You hear a lot about it with mild out-patients, but we also see it more severely in the ICU."

"Hallucinations and confusion are commonly experienced during all sorts of severe illnesses."

Joseph Khabbaza, pulmonary and critical care physician, Cleveland Clinic

People with long haul COVID experiencing cognitive issues may not find much comfort in the conclusions reached by researchers in a new study out of the Cleveland Clinic, published in the journal Alzheimer's Research & Therapy. But researchers managed to reveal a close network relationship between COVID-19 and Alzheimer's. The study revealed that an overlap between the virus and the brain changes may be causing those cognitive issues.

Considered a new finding and rare at one point in this ever-expanding saga of COVID effects on the human body physically and psychologically, those enduring COVID long-haul symptom cases now more commonly identified, inspired researchers at the Cleveland Clinic to set out to obtain a clearer understanding of the pathways through which the virus produces neurological complications. They succeeding in uncovering a relationship between the virus and Alzheimer's.

One of the debilitating symptoms experienced by long-haulers is often called brain fog ... a term describing the approximately ten percent of COVID sufferers with troubling symptoms remaining of their bout with the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID. This form of cognitive impairment, like delirium and hallucinations was believed at first to reflect the outcome of the battle waged by the body's immune system against the virus.

Setting out to explore any relationship between the virus and neurological diseases, the researchers made use of artificial intelligence to enable them to map underlying similarities across conditions, finding COVID-19 features a close network relationship with multiple neurological diseases -- notably Alzheimer's -- where an infection has the potential to lead to symptoms very similar to dementia. A search for associations was launched between the virus and the types of neuroinflammation and microvascular injury recognized in the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers.

That search succeeded in convincing the researchers that the virus may conceive a stranglehold leading to neuroinflammaton and injury of the microvascular condition of the brain. Which in turn may lead to cognition impairment with stark similarities to the ultimately fatal disease of Alzheimer's. There are no good-news stories to be found associated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus infecting with COVID-19.

New research has looked at cognitive symptoms associated with the virus. Getty