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QINGDAO TODAY
在线翻译:
szdaily -> Tech and Science -> 
Delirium, other brain changes may be signs of coronavirus
    2020-04-20  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

THERE is growing evidence to suggest that COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, can affect not only the lungs, but the brain, too.

A recent study of 214 patients in Wuhan found more than a third had neurologic manifestations of the disease, including loss of consciousness and stroke.

Physicians in the U.S. have noted the same.

“We’re seeing a significant increase in the number of patients with large strokes,” Dr. Johanna Fifi, associate director of the cerebrovascular center at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, said.

Many are patients in their 30s and 40s. Over a recent two-week period, Fifi told NBC News she had five COVID-19 patients under age 49, all with strokes resulting from a blockage in one of the major blood vessels leading to the brain.

Two of those patients had what Fifi described as mild coronavirus conditions before the stroke. The other three had no symptoms at all.

How the virus might lead to a stroke or other neurological impairment remains unclear. Fifi said it’s possible that inflammation in the body could damage blood vessels in the brain, or that the viral infection leads to increased clotting.

Dr. E. Wesley Ely, a professor of medicine and critical care at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has another theory: The virus is “probably invading the brain.”

Ely explained that symptoms such as loss of smell and taste reported among some coronavirus patients are neurologic in nature.

“That’s something that still needs to be teased apart and figured out,” Dr. Felicia Chow, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, said.

To fill that void, Ely and colleagues with the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship Center, in partnership with Vanderbilt and the Nashville VA, have launched a study of post-mortem brain tissue to look for signs of COVID-19 in the brain. The National Institutes of Health is funding the research.

Hutcherson urged others to watch for unusual cognitive changes in family members, including lapses in consciousness and unexplained confusion.

(SD-Agencies)

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