Speaker 1: It's Tuesday, March eight. I'm Oscar Emiras from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America.
Speaker 1: A new study looking at brain scans of people before
Speaker 1: and after contracting COVID shows that they had more loss
Speaker 1: of gray matter and tissue damage than those who did
Speaker 1: not get infected. Notably, the study looked at those that
Speaker 1: were older and had more mild infections, meaning they did
Speaker 1: not have to go to the hospital. The shrinkage and
Speaker 1: damage was primarily an areas associated with smell. Pambelic, health
Speaker 1: and science writer at The New York Times joins us
Speaker 1: for more. Thanks for joining us, Pam, So I'm happy
Speaker 1: to join you. Well, I wanted to talk about an
Speaker 1: interesting thing that is COVID related. And this is not
Speaker 1: to raise any alarms. This is all uh interesting, an
Speaker 1: interesting study, but there's a lot more questions. Really they
Speaker 1: needs to be answered for this. But we're looking at
Speaker 1: brain scans of people before and after COVID infection and
Speaker 1: some of them are showing more loss of gray matter
Speaker 1: and tissue damage than in those that didn't have COVID,
Speaker 1: and particularly in the area that is around around smell,
Speaker 1: which kind of tracks with you know a lot of
Speaker 1: people that lost their sense of smell and taste when
Speaker 1: they got infected. But Pam, tell us what we're seeing
Speaker 1: in this study, Yeah, exactly. I think you characterized it
Speaker 1: exactly right. It's a really interesting study because it appears
Speaker 1: to be the first time that researchers have had access
Speaker 1: to brain scans of people before they got COVID and
Speaker 1: then about three years later they had scans of these
Speaker 1: same people and some of those people had COVID in between.
Speaker 1: So this is medical information that comes from a huge
Speaker 1: sort of treasure trove of medical records in the United Kingdom.
Speaker 1: It's called the UK Biobank, and they have medical records
Speaker 1: of lots and lots of people. And what they did
Speaker 1: is they focused on almost eight hundred people and and
Speaker 1: they were able to see about four hundred of them
Speaker 1: had got COVID, and so they had these before scans
Speaker 1: of their brain and then they had an after scan
Speaker 1: about four and a half months after they had their
Speaker 1: COVID infection. So they were looking at this to see
Speaker 1: did anything change in their brain, And what they found
Speaker 1: is that the people who had COVID lost more gray
Speaker 1: matter than the people who didn't so normal aging, we
Speaker 1: naturally lose a little bit of gray matter in our
Speaker 1: brains every year, tiny percentage, and the patients who had
Speaker 1: COVID ended up losing significantly more sad up to more.
Speaker 1: It's not huge, but in terms of sort of brain volume,
Speaker 1: it's significant. And as you said, most of the areas
Speaker 1: where they noticed this change, we're in brain areas related
Speaker 1: to sense of smell, which kind of makes sense. But
Speaker 1: because it's the brain and there's so much overlap in
Speaker 1: the brain and almost everything in the brain has like
Speaker 1: multiple functions, some of these areas also have other brain
Speaker 1: functions related to memory and things like that, so it
Speaker 1: raises questions about, like, what does this mean. The typical
Speaker 1: brain loss was about point two to point three percent annually,
Speaker 1: and yeah, these people went from point to to almost
Speaker 1: two percent, So that is a pretty big jump, right there.
Speaker 1: Some things to note though, from this study, they were
Speaker 1: older people, so these are people fifty one to eighty
Speaker 1: one that they were looking at. And also most of
Speaker 1: these people that were infected had milder symptoms, so they
Speaker 1: and you know, we don't know what the correlation were
Speaker 1: between the people that actually did lose their sense of
Speaker 1: smell or people that had long COVID, which attracts with
Speaker 1: some of these other neurological things like you know, the
Speaker 1: brain fog and memory loss and just kind of hard
Speaker 1: to normally function exactly. One of the big unknowns. There
Speaker 1: are many unknowns with this study. One of the big
Speaker 1: unknowns is what was health like for these folks. Did
Speaker 1: they have symptoms, did they lose their sense of smell?
Speaker 1: Do they have long COVID? We really don't know about.
Speaker 1: The research did not have access to that kind of information,
Speaker 1: so they're sort of looking in a vacuum. What they're
Speaker 1: what they're finding is they did see brain changes, but
Speaker 1: they cannot correlate them to people's symptoms. So yes, and
Speaker 1: they were older people, so this can not say really
Speaker 1: anything about anybody who's under fifty, and it's just sort
Speaker 1: of raising this question. I think the most definitive thing
Speaker 1: that you can say is that it is one of
Speaker 1: the strongest studies showing that something does actually change in
Speaker 1: your brain when you have COVID. We don't really know why.
Speaker 1: There's a few def theories about what could be causing this,
Speaker 1: but it appears pretty good evidence here anyway that's having
Speaker 1: COVID can produce some kind of change in your brain.
Speaker 1: The other big unknown here is how long does this last?
Speaker 1: Because these folks were scanned only once after their COVID infection,
Speaker 1: about four and a half mon after on average, but
Speaker 1: a year out is their brain will look different. We
Speaker 1: don't know, yah, and one of the big culprits. And
Speaker 1: they suspect that one of the big culprits is one
Speaker 1: of the big culprits that are you know, a key
Speaker 1: and a lot of the problems when people get covered inflammation,
Speaker 1: So they think inflammation plays a big part in all
Speaker 1: of this. Yes, that's definitely one theory. Another theory that
Speaker 1: I thought was kind of interesting is that it's possible
Speaker 1: that if you're losing yourself to smell, the information, the
Speaker 1: sort of sensory information that being able to smell something
Speaker 1: carries to your brain is kind of interrupted, and so
Speaker 1: it's possible that what they call sensory deprivation is sort
Speaker 1: of causing some areas of your brain to be less
Speaker 1: active and and maybe you know, lose some of their
Speaker 1: some of their volume. So that's kind of interesting. The
Speaker 1: one area that I think most but not everybody in
Speaker 1: the field is sort of has an sense it's about
Speaker 1: is that it doesn't appear that COVID is a virus
Speaker 1: that invade the brain directly all that often it might
Speaker 1: be able to there's some evidence that can, but that
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be the way this virus really works.
Speaker 1: So we're probably talking about an effect that is kind
Speaker 1: of secondary to your body's response to the infection. Well,
Speaker 1: some interesting stuff things for scientists to build off of
Speaker 1: these findings and learn a little bit more, so hopefully
Speaker 1: we can get there. Pambelic, health and science writer at
Speaker 1: the New York Times, thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much. I'm Oscar Emiras and this has been
Speaker 1: reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories,
Speaker 1: you can check me out in the Daily Dive podcast
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