I'm going to be asking for heparin immediately hoping that swift application will neutralize the virus before it can get to the brain.
I'm going to be asking for heparin as a blood thinner because of this:
Common FDA-approved drug may effectively neutralize virus that causes COVID-19
You can't listen to me, I'm not medically trained.
How the Coronavirus Attacks the Brain
It’s not just the lungs — the pathogen may enter brain cells, causing symptoms like delirium and confusion, scientists reported.
The coronavirus targets the lungs foremost, but also the kidneys, liver and blood vessels. Still, about half of patients report neurological symptoms, including headaches, confusion and delirium, suggesting the virus may also attack the brain.
A new study offers the first clear evidence that, in some people, the coronavirus invades brain cells, hijacking them to make copies of itself. The virus also seems to suck up all of the oxygen nearby, starving neighboring cells to death.
It’s unclear how the virus gets to the brain or how often it sets off this trail of destruction. Infection of the brain is likely to be rare, but some people may be susceptible because of their genetic backgrounds, a high viral load or other reasons.
“If the brain does become infected, it could have a lethal consequence,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who led the work.
The study was posted online on Wednesday and has not yet been vetted by experts for publication. But several researchers said it was careful and elegant, showing in multiple ways that the virus can infect brain cells.
Scientists have had to rely on brain imaging and patient symptoms to infer effects on the brain, but “we hadn’t really seen much evidence that the virus can infect the brain, even though we knew it was a potential possibility,” said Dr. Michael Zandi, consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Britain. “This data just provides a little bit more evidence that it certainly can.”
Dr. Zandi and his colleagues published research in July showing that some patients with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, develop serious neurological complications, including nerve damage.
In the new study, Dr. Iwasaki and her colleagues documented brain infection in three ways: in brain tissue from a person who died of Covid-19, in a mouse model and in organoids — clusters of brain cells in a lab dish meant to mimic the brain’s three-dimensional structure.
Other pathogens — including the Zika virus — are known to infect brain cells. Immune cells then flood the damaged sites, trying to cleanse the brain by destroying infected cells.
The
coronavirus is much stealthier: It exploits the brain cells’ machinery
to multiply, but doesn’t destroy them. Instead, it chokes off oxygen to
adjacent cells, causing them to wither and die.(This probably explains why autopsies of brains didn't show clotting, it kills brain cells a different way.)
The researchers didn’t find any evidence of an immune response to remedy this problem. “It’s kind of a silent infection,” Dr. Iwasaki said. “This virus has a lot of evasion mechanisms.”
These findings are consistent with other observations in organoids infected with the coronavirus, said Alysson Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who has also studied the Zika virus.
The coronavirus seems to rapidly decrease the number of synapses, the connections between neurons. “Days after infection, and we already see a dramatic reduction in the amount of synapses,” Dr. Muotri said. “We don’t know yet if that is reversible or not.”
The virus infects a cell via a protein on its surface called ACE2. That protein appears throughout the body and especially in the lungs, explaining why they are favored targets of the virus.
Previous studies have suggested, based on a proxy for protein levels, that the brain has very little ACE2 and is likely to be spared. But Dr. Iwasaki and her colleagues looked more closely and found that the virus could indeed enter brain cells using this doorway.
“It’s pretty clear that it is expressed in the neurons and it’s required for entry,” Dr. Iwasaki said.
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