It’s 2024, and we get to relearn the same thing we’ve learned every year since the pandemic started: Covid causes brain damage!
Be aware that in most news articles about covid and brain damage, like this one, the authors usually measure the cognitive impacts in terms of IQ points, which is a bad way to measure it but it’s what most people understand, I guess.
How Covid Harms the Brain
The effects of a SARS-CoV-2 infection on the brain are the focus of intense research and remain only partially understood. Studies suggest that during acute infection, the virus may damage nerves, particularly in the olfactory bulb — which houses the nerves that transmit smell impulses to the brain — leading to problems that can persist for years. In some cases, the virus may infect the brain through this pathway, altering the organ’s structure and resulting in impaired cognition and fatigue.
Persistent viral remnants or the initial infection itself may trigger neuroinflammation and disrupt the immune system, causing antibodies and T cells to mistakenly attack healthy brain cells, damage blood vessels, and harm the blood-brain barrier. Additional research points to blood clots that may drive immune activation, restricting the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the brain, and altered levels of key hormones cortisol and dopamine that may be linked to changes in gut health.
New vaccines are available, and I just got mine, but If you don’t have insurance it will be expensive because our bloodthirsty capitalist oligarchs hate you. A lot of countries are just relying on constant covid infections to build up “herd immunity” which doesn’t work with the common cold or flu, and those are far less infectious and don’t mutate as quickly.
How else do you quantify cognitive impacts? Geniunely curious if there is any way other than the bs IQ thing.
One of the tasks covid researchers are using to determine cognitive issues are a Go / No-Go Task
In psychology, go/no-go test, developed by neuropsychologist Alexander Luria in 1940-50s is used to measure a participant’s capacity for switching between several types of behavioural response (“plasticity”) and control of adequacy of response (impulse control and sustained attention). Since the work of Alexander Luria in neuropsychology, such response is linked to the cortical frontal lobes.
For example, a go/no-go test that requires a participant to perform an action given certain stimuli (e.g., press a button) and also inhibit that action under a different set of stimuli (e.g., not press that same button).
The impact is similar to people who suffer concussions, so doctors have been testing people with concussion screening questions. But it’s hard to quantify memory problems, increased anxiety, and depression.
