Health Protocol for Mandatory Coronavirus Vaccination

Old article, but I don't remember if it was mentioned on the forum:

Severe Covid infections can inflame brain’s ‘control centre’, research says

Severe Covid infections can drive inflammation in the brain’s “control centre”, researchers say, leading to damage that may explain the long-term breathlessness, fatigue and anxiety some patients experience.

High-resolution MRI scans of 30 people hospitalised with Covid early in the pandemic, before the introduction of vaccines, found signs of inflammation in the brainstem, a small but critical structure that governs life-sustaining bodily functions such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.

The scans suggest that severe Covid infections can provoke an immune reaction which inflames the brainstem, with the resulting damage producing symptoms that can last for months after patients have been discharged.


The fact that we see abnormalities in the parts of the brain associated with breathing strongly suggests that long-lasting symptoms are an effect of inflammation in the brainstem following Covid-19 infection,” said Dr Catarina Rua, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge and first author on the study.

The project was launched before researchers and public health officials knew about long Covid, the chronic post-viral illness estimated to affect 2 million people in England and Scotland and tens of millions globally. But many people with long Covid report breathlessness and fatigue, raising the possibility that brain inflammation could be involved in their symptoms, too.

“We didn’t study people with long Covid, but they do often have long-lasting effects of breathlessness and fatigue, which are similar to the symptoms these very severely affected people had six months after they were hospitalised,” Rua said. “It does lead us to ask the question, do people with long Covid have any brainstem changes?”

Rua and her colleagues used powerful 7 Tesla MRI scanners to image the patients’ brains. These revealed enough detail to see inflammation and microstructural abnormalities in the brainstem tissue. All of the patients had been admitted to hospital with severe Covid near the start of the pandemic.

The scans highlighted abnormalities linked to inflammation in multiple parts of the brainstem, starting several weeks after patients were admitted to hospital. The damage was still evident in scans more than six months later.

Damage to the brainstem might also contribute to the mental health problems some patients face after Covid infection. Of the patients in the study, those with the highest levels of brainstem inflammation had the most severe physical symptoms and the highest levels of depression and anxiety, according to the study published in Brain.

“While this study does not conclusively prove the causes of long Covid, it does point a finger at one possible suspect for some of the symptoms experienced,” said Paul Mullins, a professor in neuroimaging at the University of Bangor. “It is not clear that this shows much in the way of possible treatments for long Covid once it has occurred, but it perhaps does point to the need to reduce inflammatory responses during initial Covid infection and response.”


Symptoms of fatigue, dyspnea, breathlessness, cough and chest pain are common in the months after COVID-19 infection. Brainstem changes may predispose to, or exacerbate, such symptoms over and above peripheral organ damage. This role in the aetiology of long-term symptoms may arise because the brainstem provides a nexus between sensory and motor inputs, and between the spinal cord and the brain, with nuclei that are responsible for controlling the sleep-wake cycle, respiratory drive, cardiac and vasomotor regulation. We hypothesize that a brainstem insult follows COVID-19 in hospitalized patients, impairing autonomic functions that contribute to persisting clinical symptoms. In part, a similar pattern is observed following post severe traumatic brain injury, with patients reporting fatigue and dizziness but also tachycardia, tachypnoea and hypertension, linked to acute or chronic brainstem dysfunction.

Neuropathological changes in the brainstem in patients with COVID-19 have been detected post-mortem. In most cases, there is no evidence of direct viral infection of the CNS but rather a neuroinflammatory response to systemic infection. The process of increase in χ in patients recovering from COVID-19 infection is reminiscent of the observed inflammatory response in other neuroinflammatory disorders such as multiple sclerosis. In COVID-19, we hypothesize that an indirect effect of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is to cause similar iron dysregulation via microglia activation. During acute inflammation, macrophage iron levels rise in concert with increased production of cytokines and reactive oxygen species. Indeed, an increase of intracellular iron content can itself promote a proinflammatory state. Increased susceptibility might also reflect a loss of myelin, whether directly or indirectly, as a consequence of neuroinflammation. However, the loss of myelin is typically a slower process than autoimmune neuroinflammation.

CRP is a non-specific marker of inflammation or infection and has been found elevated in patients with COVID-19 and other acute respiratory syndromes such as the H1N1 influenza virus. Our results showed that patients with a greater peak inflammatory response during hospital admission (peak CRP) exhibited increased tissue susceptibility (likely associated with increased inflammation) in clusters within the medulla responsible for a regular autonomic respiratory function. In turn, patients with a more favourable functional outcome (mRs 0–2), with shorter hospital stays or lower COVID severity ratings showed decreased susceptibility in the medullary clusters. COVID-19 appears to drive a post-viral, long-lasting, hyperactivation of the immune system within the brainstem, impairing certain autonomic functions. In a similar manner, a portion of SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome survivors have shown similar long-lasting post-viral illnesses.

In conclusion, we show that the brainstem is a site of vulnerability to long-term effects of COVID-19, with persistent changes evident in the months after hospitalization. These changes were more evident in patients with longer hospital stays, higher COVID severity, more prominent inflammatory responses and worse functional outcomes. Ultra-high field 7 T QSM was sensitive to these pathological changes in the brainstem, which could not be detected at standard clinical field strengths. This approach can provide a valuable tool to better probe the brain for the long-term effects of COVID-19 and other potential SARS-CoV diseases, in order to inform acute and long-term therapeutic strategies to aid recovery.

 
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