UK: Even mild forms of COVID-19 can cause a reduction in brain size, according to scientists in the UK.
They scanned the brains of over 400 people who had previously had COVID-19, most of them mild cases.
They found that the overall brain size in infected participants had shrunk between 0.2 and 2 percent, and patients experienced losses in grey matter in the olfactory areas, linked to smell, and regions linked to memory.
The apparent effect of this was that those who had recently recovered from COVID-19 found it a bit harder to perform complex mental tasks.
The study was published on Monday in the science journal Nature. Lead author of the study Professor Gwenaelle Douaud, from Oxford University’s Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging said: “We were looking at essentially mild infection, so to see that we could really see some differences in their brain and how much their brain had changed compared with those who had not been infected was quite a surprise.” - ARAB NEWS
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