Blood-Brain Barrier Breach Blamed For Brain-Fog

Move Over, Leaky Gut. Now It’s A Leaky Brain.

…which is not a headline that promises good news, and indeed, the only good news about this currently is “now we know another thing that’s happening, and thus can work towards a treatment for it”.

Back in February (most popular media outlets did not rush to publish this, as it rather goes against the narrative of “remember when COVID was a thing?” as though the numbers haven’t risen since the state of emergency was declared over), a team of Irish researchers made a discovery:

❝For the first time, we have been able to show that leaky blood vessels in the human brain, in tandem with a hyperactive immune system may be the key drivers of brain fog associated with long covid❞

~ Dr. Matthew Campbell (one of the researchers)

Let’s break that down a little, borrowing some context from the paper itself:

• the leaky blood vessels are breaching the blood-brain-barrier
  • that’s a big deal, because that barrier is our only filter between our brain and Things That Definitely Should Not Go In The Brain™
• a hyperactive immune system can also be described as chronic inflammation
  • in this case, that includes chronic neuroinflammation which, yes, is also a major driver of dementia

You may be wondering what COVID has to do with this, and well:

• these blood-brain-barrier breaches were very significantly associated (in lay terms: correlated, but correlated is only really used as an absolute in write-ups) with either acute COVID infection, or Long Covid.
• checking this in vitro, exposure of brain endothelial cells to serum from patients with Long Covid induced the same expression of inflammatory markers.

How important is this?

As another researcher (not to mention: professor of neurology and head of the school of medicine at Trinity) put it:

❝The findings will now likely change the landscape of how we understand and treat post-viral neurological conditions.

It also confirms that the neurological symptoms of long covid are measurable with real and demonstrable metabolic and vascular changes in the brain.❞

~ Dr. Colin Doherty (see mini-bio above)

You can read a pop-science article about this here:

Irish researchers discover underlying cause of “brain fog” linked with long covid

…and you can read the paper in full here:

Blood–brain barrier disruption and sustained systemic inflammation in individuals with long COVID-associated cognitive impairment

Want to stay safe?

Beyond the obvious “get protected when offered boosters/updates” (see also: The Truth About Vaccines), other good practices include the same things most people were doing when the pandemic was big news, especially avoiding enclosed densely-populated places, washing hands frequently, and looking after your immune system. For that latter, see also:

Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!

Take care!