Unlocking the Secret Link Between COVID and Anxiety: Discover the Surprising Research Findings on Your Brain’s Response

June 2, 2023 – Anxiety, depression, and COVID-19 can be a bad combination for your brain and long-term health.

Have anxiety and depression. before a COVID infection increases the risk of developing prolonged COVID, researchers have found.

Those with prolonged COVID who develop anxiety and depression. after an infection can have brain shrink in areas that regulate memory, emotion, and other functions, as well as disruption of brain connectivity.

While many questions remain about these intertwined relationships, the associations are not a total surprise. Experts already know that depression and anxiety are associated with inflammation and immune dysfunction, which may help explain the link between these mental health conditions, the risk of prolonged COVID, and changes in the brain.

The brain changes that accompany a COVID infection have concerned researchers since the beginning of the pandemic, when researchers at the UK Biobank found brain atrophy, loss of gray matter, and decreased cognition in those infected with COVID compared with those not infected.

Common Conditions

The researchers evaluated data from three large ongoing studies that included nearly 55,000 participants to determine the effects of high levels of psychological distress before a COVID infection.

“Our study was purely survey-based,” said Siwen Wang, MD, the study’s lead author and a research fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.

At the beginning of the survey in April 2020, none of the participants reported a current or previous COVID infection. They answered surveys on psychological distress at the beginning of the study, at 6 monthly time points, then quarterly until November 2021.

During follow-up, 3,193 people reported a positive COVID test and 43% of them, or 1,403, developed long-term COVID. That number may seem high, but 38% of the 55,000 were active healthcare workers. On the final questionnaire, they reported whether their symptoms persisted for 4 weeks or longer and therefore they had long-term COVID according to the CDC’s standard definition.

In one of his studies, presented at the 2023 American Academy of Neurology meeting in April, he found brain changes in people with anxiety, depression and COVID, but not in infected people who did not have any mental health problems. She tested 254 people, median age 41, after about 82 days of their positive PCR test for COVID. All completed a standard questionnaire for depression (the Beck Depression Inventory) and another for anxiety (the Beck Anxiety Inventory). In addition, she divided them into two groups: the 102 with symptoms and the 152 who did not have symptoms of depression or anxiety.

Brain scans showed that those with COVID who also had anxiety and depression had shrinkage in the limbic area of ​​the brain (which helps process emotions and memory), while those infected who did not have anxiety or depression did not. The researchers then scanned the brains of 148 healthy people without COVID and found no shrinkage.

Atrophy, Yasuda said, “is not something you can see with your eyes. It was only detected with computer analysis. The visualization in an MRI is normal.

Another, less conventional hypothesis, he said, is that “those with long-term COVID have more autoantibodies and are more likely to have blood clotting problems. These have also been found in people with anxiety, depression, or other psychological disorders.”

Other researchers are looking more broadly at how COVID infections affect the brain. When German researchers evaluated the brain and other body parts of 20 patients who died of causes other than COVID but had documented COVID infections, they found that 12 had accumulations of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in brain tissue, as well as in the skull and meninges, the membranes that cover the skull and spinal cord. Healthy controls did not.

The findings suggest that the persistence of the spike protein may contribute to the long-term neurological symptoms of long-term COVID and may also lead to an understanding of the molecular mechanisms as well as therapies for long-term COVID, the researchers said in their paper. preliminary report, which has not yet been peer reviewed.

In another recent study, Researchers from Hamburg, Germany performed neuropsychological and neuroimaging assessments of 223 unvaccinated people who recovered from mild to moderate COVID infections, comparing them with 223 matched healthy controls who underwent the same tests. In those infected, they found alterations in the cerebral white matter but did not worsen cognitive function in the first year after recovery. They conclude that the infection triggers a prolonged neuroinflammatory response.

Habits included: a healthy BMI (18.5 to 24.9), never smoking, at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week, moderate alcohol consumption (5-15 grams per day), high quality diet and good sleep (7-9 hours every night).

long term solutions

Yasuda hopes that mental health care, for the infected and the uninfected, will be taken more seriously. In its comment about his own long experience with COVID, he wrote, in part: “I fear for the many survivors of COVID-19 who do not have access to medical care for their post-COVID symptoms. … The mental health system must be prepared to receive survivors with different neuropsychiatric symptoms, such as anxiety and depression.”