COVID’s Effect on the Brain May Be Worse Than Thought
(Getty/Alexander Sikov)
COVID’s first wave may have passed, but its long-term impact on the brain is just starting to come into focus. In a Bloomberg piece, Jason Gale explores this question, drawing on his book After COVID: The Health Impacts That Will Last Generations. What began as scattered reports of lingering fatigue and “brain fog” has emerged as a broader pattern of subtle but measurable neurological changes that can persist long after the initial respiratory symptoms disappear. Early in the pandemic, neurologists were surprised by rare cases of sudden respiratory arrest linked to damage deep in the brain stem, a critical region controlling automatic breathing—an early sign that COVID might do more than attack the lungs, potentially rewiring neural circuits.
Since then, advanced imaging and cognitive testing have revealed differences in brain tissue structure, chemical signaling, and blood flow in people who had COVID, including those who believed they had fully recovered. Large-scale studies link COVID to lasting drops in cognitive performance, higher rates of impairment, and dementia-level declines in older adults, along with biomarker changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. A UK human challenge study suggests even mild infections can reduce memory and decision-making performance, while imaging from South Korea shows thinning in brain regions tied to attention and memory, abnormal iron deposits, and signs of ongoing brain-cell stress up to a year later.
Researchers debate how much COVID will accelerate dementia, but neurologist Avindra Nath of the National Institutes of Health warns of a “huge public-health problem” on the horizon. He is testing immune-targeting therapies to determine whether some of the neurological damage can be reversed.
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