Survivors of Covid-19, even those who had just mild cases of the virus, can lose gray matter in their brains equivalent to ten years of aging, a new study says.
The study, which was published on Monday in the journal Nature, an effort to pin down the difficult diagnosis of “long Covid,” is thought to be the largest of its kind.
The study showed that the brains of people who had recovered from Covid-19 had suffered a greater loss of gray matter and indicated a larger presence of abnormalities in brain tissue compared with those who had avoided the disease.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the physiological changes noted by the researchers were in the area of the brain that is connected to the sense of smell; this sense is often one of the first symptoms of Covid that patients notice after contracting it.