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Your brain on SARS-CoV-2
It’s clear by now that SARS-CoV-2 is not just a respiratory virus, but also one that can affect organs throughout the body—including the brain. Researchers are still learning about why that is, but leading hypotheses suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may cause persistent inflammation in the brain, damage to blood vessels in the brain, immune dysfunction so extreme it affects the brain, or perhaps a combination of all the above. Studies have even found that people’s brains can shrink after having COVID-19, a change potentially associated with cognitive issues.ADVERTISEMENT
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COVID-19 has been linked to serious cognitive problems, including dementia and suicidal thinking. And brain fog, a common symptom of Long COVID, can be so profound that people are unable to live the lives and work the jobs they once did. But COVID-19 also seems able to affect the brain in subtler ways. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared the cognitive performance of people who'd fully recovered from COVID-19 with that of a similar group of people who'd never had the virus. The COVID-19 group did worse, equivalent to a deficit of about three IQ points.