Brain's Frontal Lobes Electrical Activity Potentially Affected by COVID-19
🚨💉🦠 COVID-19 and Brain Abnormalities: The Gist 🦠💉
🤕 Symptoms Galore 🤕
Research suggests that around 15-25% of folks with severe COVID-19 might experience some weird neurological symptoms, like headaches, dizziness, and even seizures.
🧠 Brain Scans 🧠
When these symptoms pop up, doctors might run an electroencephalography (EEG) test, which involves placing electrodes on the scalp to check out the brain's electrical activity.
💻 Study Time 💻
A team of researchers analyzed EEG results from over 600 patients, pulled from 84 different studies, to understand COVID-19's impact on the brain.
👴 Average Joes 👴
On average, the patients were 61.3 years old, and about 2/3 were males.
🤕 Common Findings 🤕
The researchers found that brain waves were slow, and there were strange electrical discharges, particularly in the frontal lobe of the brain. Thebadder the disease, the worse the EEG results tended to be, especially for those with preexisting conditions like epilepsy.
💡 Quick Takeaways 💡
- COVID-19 seems to affect the brain more where the virus likely enters – the frontal lobe.
- Systemic issues caused by the virus, like inflammation and low oxygen levels, might also lead to brain problems outside the frontal lobe.
- "Brain fog" – ongoing health issues in recovering COVID patients – might be a long-term worry. Aside from some improvements, most people in the study still showed abnormalities.
🔎 Study Limitations 🔎
The researchers didn't have access to individual study data, which could've provided more detail. Also, doctors might've under-reported normal EEGs, or over-reported those in patients with neurological symptoms, skewing the results. And, giving anti-seizure meds to suspected seizure patients could've made it harder to see anomalies on the EEG scans.
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- This study on COVID-19's impact on the brain revealed that roughly 15-25% of severe COVID-19 cases may result in neurological symptoms such as seizures.
- EEG tests were conducted on patients to monitor brain activity, with researchers finding slow brain waves and unusual electrical discharges, particularly in the frontal lobe of the brain.
- The researchers found that the severity of the disease often corresponded with the abnormalities observed in EEG results, especially in those with preexisting conditions like epilepsy.
- The study raises concerns about long-term issues such as "brain fog" in recovering COVID patients, as most participants still showed brain abnormalities despite some improvements.
