Four years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people are still suffering from one of the disease’s worst side effects — long COVID-19 and the debilitating brain fog it causes. Researchers at Rutgers University recently published one of the most detailed investigations into the symptom, looking at how and why it causes some people to experience difficulty thinking or concentrating. The researchers recruited a group of people who were seeking care at Rutgers for their COVID-19-related symptoms and followed them over the course of two years.
“We were able to collect other immune cells in the spinal fluid that were in contact with the brain,” Dr. William Hu, senior author of the study, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. Hu is the director of the Center for Healthy Aging Research at Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research. “And then we were able to study the genes in these cells and what we learned was that long COVID was really very similar to acute infection — acute SARS COV2 infection.”
Scientists previously proposed that long COVID may display molecular features of Alzheimer’s disease. The Rutgers researchers didn’t find signatures of Alzheimer’s-type changes.
“The findings from our study lead us to believe that interferon — the body’s natural antiviral — and other drugs which target COVID-19 will be most beneficial in people with long COVID,” Hu said.
