Brain changes from covid. So what they did here is find brain scans from both before and after a covid infection detected. They found 401 people with brain scans from before and after in UK Biobank, along with 384 controls, so they could distinguish changes caused by covid from pre-existing brain issues.

I'll go straight to the results. First there was an overall decrease in brain volume which the researchers attribute to a diffuse loss of grey matter. But there was also loss in some very specific regions: the primary olfactory cortex and parts that connect to the primary olfactory cortex, and the orbitofrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus.

If you heard (or experienced) that covid make people lose their sense of smell, then the olfactory cortex might not come as a surprise. The parahippocampal gyrus is part of the limbic system, which is also involved in olfaction, though the parahippocampal gyrus, because it also connects to the hippocampus, is also involved in memory. As for the orbitofrontal cortex, it's actually part of the prefrontal cortex region in the frontal lobes of the brain which are involved in "higher" thought processes like decision making.

SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank

#coronavirus #neuroscience