GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A new study could explain the impact of COVID-19 on the brain and why some people deal with lingering symptoms even years later.
“When you look at the first round of COVID, it was a global pandemic, and so we’re talking individuals in the millions,” said Dr. Michael Lawrence, a neuropsychologist at Corewell Health and lead author of the study.
Doctors have previously found it difficult to understand why some people are impacted by long COVID while others are not. The goal of this study was to compare two groups of post-COVID patients: 10 who reported long COVID symptoms and seven who were fully recovered. All participants underwent an interview on their self-rated health and quality of life, a battery of neurocognitive tests and blood draw for biomarker analysis.
Health workers still feel COVID’s impact 5 years later
“We wanted to target specific systems in this study so we looked at inflammatory system and we also found that one of the markers for inflammation was much higher in patients with long COVID that didn’t recover and that marker was very, very interesting because it might explain why long COVID patients might have such dramatic fatigue,” said Dr. Bengt Arnetz of Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine and co-author of the study…