Coronavirus Ravages the Lungs. It Also Affects the Brain. Link to article WSJ.
Through a growing number of papers, doctors around the globe are chronicling Covid-19’s lesser-known neurological manifestations including brain inflammation, hallucinations, seizures, cognitive deficits and loss of smell and taste. It is unknown whether these are caused directly by the virus infiltrating the nervous system, or by the body’s immune response to infection.
My 2 cents. If it’s the body’s immune response to the virus , could these severe reactions , including difficulty breathing, be mitigated by using TPA earlier in the course of the disease?
Last Friday, Chinese doctors published a study of 214 hospitalized patients in Wuhan showing that more than a third had neurologic symptoms. The most common included dizzi-ness, headaches, impaired consciousness, skeletal-muscle injury and loss of smell and taste. The paper—published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the largest to date on the disease’s impact on normal nervous-system function—also docu-mented rare, but more serious, effects including seizures and stroke, which occurs when a blood clot hits the brain.
The novel coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, isn’t the only virus known to affect the nervous system. Research in humans and animals has shown that non-coronaviruses such as HIV, measles and certain influenza strains can infect the brain or affect its function through inflammatory responses elsewhere in the body. Labora-tory studies have shown that other coronaviruses can infect nerve cells.
Symptoms like confusion, trouble speaking or numbness on one side of the body should also be red flags. Those symp-toms can signal an impending stroke, which, if not treated within a certain time window, can lead to permanent brain damage, they said. Covid-19 patients are at higher risk of stroke due to the virus’s impact on blood clotting.
