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 COVID-19 brains show inflammation, "circuitry" problems
The brain inflammation and impaired "brain circuitry" seen in people
who die of COVID-19 look a lot like what doctors see in the brains
of people who die of neurodegenerative conditions such as
Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, researchers reported on
Monday in the journal Nature. Analyses of brain tissue from eight
people who died from COVID-19 and 14 others who died from other
causes showed "striking changes" in the COVID-19 patients' brains,
Stanford University researcher Tony Wyss-Coray told Reuters. His
team at Stanford, with colleagues at the University of Saarbruecken
in Germany, analyzed thousands of genes in each of 65,309 individual
cells taken from the brain-tissue samples. Genes involved with
cognition, schizophrenia and depression were more often "turned on"
in the COVID-19 patients' brains, they found. "There also were signs
of distress in neurons in the cerebral cortex, the brain region that
plays a key role in decision-making, memory and mathematical
reasoning," the researchers said in a statement. "These neurons ...
form complex logic circuits that perform those higher brain
functions." Wyss-Coray said his team could not find the virus itself
in the brain, which suggests that "virus infection in the rest of
the body could be enough to cause neurological symptoms, even in
people who do not die from the disease." The findings, Wyss-Coray
noted in a statement, "may help explain the brain fog, fatigue and
other neurological and psychiatric symptoms of long COVID."
(https://go.nature.com/3gP88AL)
Poor sleep history linked with more severe COVID-19
Poor sleep habits may be linked with higher risk for severe illness
in patients with COVID-19, according to Harvard University
researchers. They analyzed survey responses from more than 46,000
participants in the long-term UK Biobank study, including 8,422 who
tested positive for COVID-19. Participants had answered questions
from 2006 to 2010 about sleep duration, daytime sleepiness, insomnia
and body clocks. For the new study, based on their responses, the
researchers assigned scores ranging from 0 to 6, with higher scores
indicating multiple poor sleep "traits." In participants with
COVID-19, poor scores were associated with higher odds of death.
This was true even after researchers accounted for issues known to
be risk factors for poor COVID-19 outcomes such as sleep apnea,
obesity and smoking, they reported on Friday in the journal Clinical
Infectious Diseases.
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 Even people with two occasional
or one frequent poor sleep trait appeared to
experience higher risks for hospitalization and
death, although the difference was not
statistically significant and more study is
needed to confirm the finding, the researchers
said. Poor sleep affects the immune system and
blood clotting, both of which are key to the
body's fight against COVID-19, and "tracking
sleep behavior may have importance in
identifying those at increased risk for COVID-19
mortality and hospitalization," the authors
said. (https://bit.ly/2Ut2MUB)
Most COVID-19 antibody drugs likely work against variants
Most COVID-19 antibody drugs that are approved for emergency use in
the United States - and some that are still in development - are
likely to protect against variants of the novel coronavirus, new
data suggests. In test tube experiments, and in mice and hamsters,
researchers exposed the antibodies, alone and in combinations, to
"engineered" versions of mutated virus and to actual virus obtained
from patients infected with Alpha, Beta, or Gamma variants - first
identified in Britain, South Africa and Brazil, respectively - or
variants first seen in New York, California or India. Some
individual drugs appeared to lose effectiveness against the variants
in test tubes - but in the animals, low doses of most of the drugs,
given in combinations, were protective, the researchers reported on
Monday in the journal Nature. Another advantage of the combinations
is that they "seemed to prevent the emergence of resistant viruses,"
study co-author Jacco Boon of Washington University School of
Medicine in St. Louis said in the statement. "Resistance arose with
some of the monotherapies, but never with combination therapy."
(https://go.nature.com/3xJuOJL)
Open https://tmsnrt.rs/3c7R3Bl in an external browser for a Reuters
graphic on vaccines in development.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Will Dunham)
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