Brain's Frontal Lobes Electrical Activity Potentially Affected by COVID-19
Brain Abnormalities in COVID-19 Patients: A Look at EEG Results
A slew of research suggests that weirdo brain issues found by EEG tests are surprisingly common among folks dealing with COVID-19-related neurological symptoms.
Here's the lowdown:
COVID-19 and Brain Woes
Roughly 15-25% of severe COVID-19 cases may trigger neurological issues, including headaches, confusion, brain fog, impaired consciousness, seizures, and strokes. To get a closer look at what's going on in their heads, doctors might order an EEG test. This procedure involves stickin' some electrodes to your scalp to keep tabs on your brain's electrical activity.
To learn more about how the coronavirus impacts the noggin, scientists from Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh scrutinized EEG results from 617 patients from 84 studies.
The average age of these patients was 61.3 years, with about 2/3 of them being dudes.
The Gist: EEG Abnormalities
The most frequent findings the researchers spotted were slow-poke brain waves and freaky electric discharges. And get this—the more messed up the EEG scores were, the more severe the disease and the higher the likelihood the patient had existing neurological woes, like epilepsy.
The results were published in Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy.
EEG: A Closer Gander at the Frontal Lobes
Nearly a third of the abnormal findings surfaced in the frontal lobes. According to Dr. Zulfi Haneef, an assistant professor of neurology/neurophysiology at Baylor and one of the study's co-authors, this might have something to do with the virus's preference for the nose as its hangout spot, since the frontal lobe sits right next to it. Haneef suggests that doctors should give EEG tests a whirl for more patients and dive deeper with other brain imaging techniques like MRIs and CT scans.
The Virus or Something Else?
The researchers point out that the virus might not be entirely responsible for the messed-up EEG scores. Systemic effects of the infection, like inflammation, low oxygen levels, party-crashin' blood, and cardiac arrest, might play a part, too.
The study found "diffuse slowing" in the background electrical activity of the whole brain in nearly 70% of patients.
Brain Fog: The Long Haul
Some folks who recover from COVID-19 continue to experience lingering health issues, now collectively known as long COVID. Among them is "brain fog."
A recent study, yet to be peer-reviewed, revealed that individuals who believe they got COVID performed more poorly on an online test than those who don't think they were disease carriers. The authors suggested that the virus might make people mentally older by about a decade.
Experts, contacted by the Science Media Centre in London, said this study doesn't prove the infection causes long-term cognitive decline. But they did hint at concerns about long-term brain effects.
According to Dr. Haneef, EEG abnormalities linked to COVID-19-induced neurological symptoms stoke those worries.
"A lot of people reckon they'll catch the illness, shake it off, and everything will be back to normal. But these findings suggest there might be long-term problems, which we've suspected for a while now and are now starting to find more evidence for," Haneef states.
On the bright side, the researchers found that more than half of those with follow-up EEG tests showed improvements.
The authors acknowledged some limitations with their analysis, such as the lack of raw data from individual studies and the potential to skew the results due to doctors omitting normal EEGs or focusing more on those with neurological symptoms. They also mentioned that doctors were doling out anti-seizure meds to folks they suspected were having seizures, which could have masked those episodes on the EEG traces.
[1] - COVID-19 and the Human Brain. (n.d.).[2] - Neuropsychiatric Manifestations and Long COVID. (2021).[3] - Long COVID: What We Know So Far About the Brain. (2021).[4] - Frontal lobe. (2014).
- The study on EEG results from COVID-19 patients suggests that the virus may contribute to a higher likelihood of patients having pre-existing neurological conditions, such as epilepsy, due to the correlation between the severity of EEG abnormalities and the disease's severity.
- Moreover, the research indicates that the coronavirus might not be solely responsible for the observed EEG abnormalities, as systemic effects of the infection, like inflammation, low oxygen levels, and cardiac arrest, might play a significant role as well.
- Notably, the frontal lobes, which are close to the virus's preferred hangout spot, the nose, accounted for nearly a third of the observed EEG abnormalities, prompting doctors to consider doing more EEG tests with other brain imaging techniques like MRIs and CT scans for patients with COVID-19.
