Abstract
The etiology of brain fog associated with long COVID is not clear. Based on some preliminary work, disruption of the blood-brain barrier has been hypothesized, but has not been tested in patients with long COVID. In this case-control pilot study, we evaluated blood-brain barrier permeability in patients with long COVID and subjective memory loss or brain fog. We used 99 m Technetium diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) to measure blood-brain barrier permeability and a telephone assessment (T-cog) to measure cognitive function. The blood-brain barrier permeability was quantified via SPECT standard uptake value (SUV). We assessed the blood-brain barrier permeability in 14 long COVID patients and 10 control participants without subjective cognitive impairment or brain fog. Participants in the two groups were similar in age. The long COVID group had more comorbidities compared to the control group. There was no difference in the SUVs in the long COVID (0.22 ± 0.12) vs the control (0.17 ± 0.04) group. There was no difference in the T-cog results in the two groups either. We found no evidence of a difference in blood-brain permeability in patients with long COVID when compared to controls without a known history of COVID-19 infection. Larger studies are needed to confirm these findings.
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The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the research coordinator Jessica Reed and the study participants.
Funding
This research was funded by the NIH K23AG055666 and University of Kansas Medical Center clinical pilot grant awarded to A. Gupta.
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Conceptualization, A. Gupta; methodology, A. Gupta and B. Comfort; formal analysis, R. Montgomery and K. Young; writing—original draft preparation, A. Gupta; writing—review and editing, B. Comfort, R. Montgomery, and K. Young; funding acquisition, A. Gupta. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Kansas Medical Center (STUDY0014699 and approved on 3/18/2021).
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Gupta, A., Comfort, B., Young, K. et al. A pilot study to assess blood-brain barrier permeability in long COVID. Brain Imaging and Behavior (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-024-00877-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-024-00877-8