WASHINGTON -- A pattern is emerging among COVID-19 patients arriving at hospitals in New York: Beyond fever, cough, and shortness of breath, some are deeply disoriented to the point of not knowing
But more unusual signs are surfacing in new reports from the frontlines.
“You’ve been hearing that this is a breathing problem, but it also affects what we most care about, the brain,” S Andrew Josephson, chair of the neurology department at the University of California, San Francisco told AFP. One is by triggering an abnormal immune response known as a cytokine storm that causes inflammation of the brain — called autoimmune encephalitis.The brain is protected by something called the blood-brain-barrier, which blocks foreign substances but could be breached if compromised.
In the case of the novel coronavirus, doctors believe based on the current evidence the neurological impacts are more likely the result of overactive immune response rather than brain invasion.This has been documented once, in a 24-year-old Japanese man whose case was published in the International Journal of Infectious Disease.
One startling finding concerns the case of a man in his fifties whose white matter — the parts of the brain that connect brain cells to each other — was so severely damaged it “would basically render him in a state of profound brain damage,” she said.Brain imaging and spinal taps are difficult to perform on patients on ventilators, and since most die, the full extent of neurologic injury isn’t yet known.
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