The new coronavirus does not need to directly invade brain tissue to damageit, a new study suggests.
Researchers examined the brains of 19 patients who died from COVID-19,focusing on tissues from regions thought to be highly susceptible to thevirus: the olfactory bulb, which controls the sense of smell, and thebrainstem, which controls breathing and heart rate.
In 14 patients, one or both of these regions contained damaged bloodvessels – some clotted, and some leaking. The areas with leakage weresurrounded by inflammation from the body’s immune response, they found.
But the researchers saw no signs of the virus itself, they report in TheNew England Journal of Medicine. “We were completely surprised,” saidcoauthor Dr. Avindra Nath of the National Institute of NeurologicalDisorders and Stroke in a statement.
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The damage his team saw is usually associated with strokes andneuroinflammatory diseases, he said. “So far, our results suggest that thedamage … may not have been caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus directlyinfecting the brain,” Dr. Nath said. “In the future, we plan to study hownovel coronavirus harms the brain’s blood vessels and whether that producessome of the short- and long-term symptoms we see in patients.”
