Jennifer Abbasi – JAMA April 12, 2022 Volume 327, Number 14 – A large study comparing brain scans from the same individuals before and after SARS-CoV-2 infection suggests that brain changes could be a lingering outcome of even mild COVID-19. Writing in Nature, researchers at Oxford University’s Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging reported that several months after study participants hadSARS-CoV-2 infections, they had more gray matter loss and tissue abnormalities, mainly in the areas of the brain associated with smell, and more brain size shrinkage than participants who hadn’t been infected with the virus.
With nearly 800 volunteers, the new study is the largest COVID-19 brain imaging analyses to date. It’s also the first to focus on patients with mostly nonsevere illness and to include preinfection data from the same people.
