Allison Guy was having a good start to the year. Her health had never been better. She loved her job and working with people. She could work on creative projects in the morning. She says things were looking great until she got Covid-19.
The initial infections was not fun. She woke up one day with an overwhelming fatigue after Guy had recovered enough to return to work full time. It was accompanied by a loss of mental sharpness, a symptom often referred to as Covid-19 "brain fog," a general term for sluggish or fuzzy thinking. I made decisions like, "Is this the day where I get a shower, or I go up and microwave myself a frozen dinner?", for most of the year. A guy remembers. She wasn't sure if she needed high-level writing for her job. She said living with those symptoms washell on Earth.
There are many Covid-19 symptoms that can persist over time. New research in the journal Cell shows how Covid-19 affects the brain. Scientists found that mice with mild Covid-19 infections had disrupted the normal activity of several brain cell populations and left behind signs of inflammation. Some of the cognitive disruption experienced by Covid-19 survivors could be explained by these findings.
For the past 20 years, Monje has been trying to understand the neurobiology behind the cognitive symptoms associated with the treatment of cancer. She was concerned when Covid-19 became a major immune-activating virus. As reports of cognitive impairment began to come out, it was clear that it was a very similar syndrome. The symptoms of impaired attention, memory, speed of information processing, dis- executive function are the same as those that people experienced.
Monje reached out to Iwasaki. A mouse model of Covid-19 was established by her group thanks to their clearance to work with the virus. A mouse model is engineered as a close stand-in for a human, and this experiment was intended to mimic the experience of a person with a mild Covid-19 infections. Iwasaki's group introduced the humanACE2 into the cells of the mice. The point of entry for the Covid-causing virus is thisreceptor. In order to control the amount and delivery of the virus, they shot it up the mices noses. The mice did not lose weight despite the infections.
Work constraints were created by the security precautions required by the Pandemic. Because most virus-related work had to be done in Iwasaki's laboratory, the Yale scientists would take advantage of overnight shipping to fly samples across the country to Monje'sStanford laboratory where they could be analyzed They would need to film the experiment with a camera to make sure everyone could see it. Monje says that it worked.
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