--- title: COVID-19 Can Affect the Brain Even Long After an Infection description: COVID-19 can have profound effects on the brain, leading to neurocognitive symptoms like brain fog, memory loss, and even dementia. canonical: https://time.com/6294762/how-covid-19-affects-brain-memory/ author: Jamie Ducharme article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-07-17T14:50:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:04.871Z article:section: Health og:title: How COVID-19 Affects the Brain, Even Long After an Infection og:description: It's been linked to brain fog, dementia, stroke, and more. og:url: https://time.com/6294762/how-covid-19-affects-brain-memory/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbb62707fadf7c03e/698a3eb347ca3810bb3baf6d/covid-19-brain.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2070 og:image:height: 1164 og:image:alt: Coronavirus in the brain og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How COVID-19 Affects the Brain, Even Long After an Infection twitter:description: It's been linked to brain fog, dementia, stroke, and more. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbb62707fadf7c03e/698a3eb347ca3810bb3baf6d/covid-19-brain.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand COVID-19's Effect On the Brain > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: It's Been a Pretty Rocky Road.' CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky Reflects on Her Tenure During COVID-19 [Watch (HLS stream): It's Been a Pretty Rocky Road.' CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky Reflects on Her Tenure During COVID-19](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/YaLbk7xu.m3u8) (8:52)  _Published 2023-06-27. Dr. Rochelle Walensky became director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in January 2021, a fraught time in the country’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic._  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Jul 17, 2023 2:50 PM UTC  Digital generated image of cut out male head multi layered with covid-19 cells inside on blue background. Digital generated image of cut out male head multi layered with covid-19 cells inside on blue background. Getty Image  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Jul 17, 2023 2:50 PM UTC Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors started to notice something striking. For what was originally described as a respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 seemed to have a strong [effect on the brain](https://time.com/5896393/coronavirus-neurologic-symptoms/), causing everything from [loss of taste and smell](https://time.com/6113909/covid-19-smell-taste-loss/) and brain fog to, in serious cases, [stroke](https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2022/01/covid-19-increasing-stroke-risks-people-of-all-ages). NYU Langone Health, a New York city research hospital, started [collating those anecdotes](https://med.nyu.edu/departments-institutes/population-health/divisions-sections-centers/biostatistics/research/neuro-databank-biobank) in hopes of better understanding how the virus affects the brain and nervous system. Years later, the project has morphed from focusing solely on acute symptoms to also tracking the long-term neurologic issues that some [people with Long COVID experience](https://time.com/6207214/covid-19-brain-impact/), says program director Dr. Sharon Meropol. The list of neurocognitive issues that Meropol’s team and other researchers must track is extensive: [cognitive decline](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2785388), [changes in brain size and structure](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5), [depression and suicidal thinking](https://time.com/6186429/suicide-long-covid/), [tremors](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.19.23291598v1), [seizures](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8053221/), [memory loss](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2022.804937/full), and new or [worsened dementia](https://covid19.nih.gov/news-and-stories/rapid-progression-dementia-following-covid-19) have all been linked to previous SARS-CoV-2 infections. In some cases, these longer-term problems occur [even in patients with relatively mild COVID-19](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8432319/). The “Holy Grail” question now, Meropol says, is what’s going on in the brains of COVID-19 patients—and how to reverse the damage. ## Gray matters If you were to look at the brain of someone infected by certain viruses, like rabies, you would see “virus teeming everywhere. It’s black and white” that the brain is infected, says Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). --- ### More from TIME --- With SARS-CoV-2, there’s more gray area. Early in the pandemic, Nath and his colleagues scanned and physically analyzed the brains of 13 people who died from COVID-19\. They didn’t find the SARS-CoV-2 virus in those brains—but they did find significant damage to their blood vessels, which were coated with antibodies. It looked to Nath like the body’s immune system had gone haywire in response to the virus, causing it to attack its own blood vessels and setting off a cascade of effects that led to significant inflammation in the brain, potentially culminating in fatal damage to the part that controls breathing. In people who survive COVID-19, brain inflammation may also explain years-long symptoms like brain fog and memory loss—though “we don’t know for sure,” Nath says. Dr. Lara Jehi, who researches COVID-19 and the brain at the Cleveland Clinic, also points to inflammation as a possible trigger for COVID-19’s neurologic symptoms. She’s found [evidence of abnormal inflammation](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36945569/) in people with chronic post-COVID headaches. And in [a 2021 study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34108016/), Jehi and her colleagues compared the brains of people with Long COVID and Alzheimer’s disease. “We found many areas of overlap between the two, and these areas of overlap centered on…inflammation in the brain and microscopic injuries to the blood vessels,” she says. Going into that study, Jehi says, her team wanted to determine whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus was entering the brain and causing damage directly, or triggering an immune response that led to brain changes. Their findings pointed to the latter—but researchers still haven’t ruled out the possibility that the virus has direct effects on the brain. ## Virus in the brain Since Nath’s brain-scanning project early in the pandemic, other researchers have found the virus in the brains of people who died from COVID-19. For [a 2022 paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05542-y) in _Nature_, researchers analyzed brain tissue of 11 people who had COVID-19 when they died. In all but one of those individuals, the researchers found the virus’ genetic material in central-nervous-system tissue—which, they wrote, “prov\[ed\] definitively that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting and replicating within the human brain.” To Nath, however, that’s still an open question, and one worthy of more research. His team has [continued to study the brains](https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/145/7/2555/6621999) of COVID-19 patients and has yet to find concrete evidence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in those organs. In [one instance](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10065204/), he says, they found viral proteins—but not the full virus—in biopsied tissue from someone who had COVID-19 at the time they were undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy. Researchers behind [an April 2023 study](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.04.535604v1) not yet been peer-reviewed also found SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins—which are found on the virus’ surface and allow it to enter human cells—in the brains of people who died from COVID-19. But the research is “inconsistent,” Nath says. “Some have found it, some have not, and some people who have found it, have found very small amounts. There’s still a gap in knowledge there.” Dr. Wes Ely, who researches brain disease at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, says he’s convinced SARS-CoV-2 can attack the “support cells” of the brain, or those ensure neurons are able to keep the brain and body functioning normally. Damaging these support cells, Ely says, can kick off a domino effect that leads to tissue death in the brain. But, Ely says, “almost certainly there are multiple processes going on”—it could be that the virus both directly affects the brain and causes changes to the immune system that lead to neurocognitive issues. “We’re not looking for a magic bullet that will solve all these problems” at once, he says. While there may not be a single solution, that doesn’t mean there’s no solution. Ely has found that “cognitive rehab,” a process of rebuilding the brain’s function through targeted mental exercises, can help people who develop similar cognitive decline after stays in the intensive-care unit. That approach could be risky for people with Long COVID, many of whom experience [worsened symptoms after mental or physical exertion](https://time.com/6215346/covid-19-rest-helps/), Ely says—but changing the immune system’s function in hopes of reducing inflammation in the brains of people with Long COVID is another promising route. NINDS is [currently enrolling patients](https://clinicalstudies.info.nih.gov/protocoldetails.aspx?id=000711-N&&query=) for a study on immunotherapy as a potential treatment for neurologic Long COVID. That approach is particularly exciting, Nath says, because it entails a therapy that is already used to treat a range of autoimmune and neurologic conditions—so if it proves effective, it could be rolled out to Long COVID patients relatively quickly. Some preliminary research also suggests blood-thinning drugs may help breakup tiny “[microclots](https://time.com/6238147/microclots-long-covid/)” in the blood that are linked to systemic inflammation, potentially relieving Long COVID symptoms including fatigue, brain fog, and difficulty concentrating. As of now, there are no proven therapies for people with Long COVID symptoms, neurologic or otherwise. But Ely says he’s optimistic that COVID-related brain changes are reversible—one way or another. “The brain is incredibly neuroplastic,” he says, “and it can do amazing things.” ## Transcript I knew I had a hard task ahead of me. I did not go into this naive. Not not all the things that I thought would be hard, work, hard and things that I didn't expect to be hard ended up being harder. I did not expect the sort of that there would be so many people who were working to undermine the methods of science. The message of Public Health in Ferris actors who really were working to undermine what good health would look like for individuals and for the country that was harder than I thought it would be. Give me what we have now. The vaccines you do natural immunity from people who are getting exposed infected as well. And now drugs, if you mentioned up where should we be in a much better place than we are now in terms of the pandemic or are we were, you would think we should be two and a half years? Three years into the pandemic? Well, I would say we are in a much better place than we were for sure. Are with over 95% of people having a munity of one flavor, or the another, and many people have immunity both related to Prior vaccination or prior infection. I'm so a lot of protection out there, but we also know, as with all respiratory viruses, they are likely to circulate some, they may very well circulate a little bit more over the fall. When respiratory virus is 10 to thrive and weird cities, he will continue to be. So Gillette take out the message out of all the things that people can do to protect themselves. And I think the public now knows what those things are information. I think in general undermining, we can do what we were working to do to get people out of the pandemic to get People Protected. I'm and now also. I see no blood into pediatric vaccination as well. And so are, you know, when vaccine is like a Cornerstone of what we do in prevention and prevention of infectious threats and that by its very nature, not just in covid been another things is being challenged, I don't know that we could have rewound, the clock, two and a half years ago and said, this incredible thing that we are celebrating with how well this vaccine worked and how this was really going to be among the most important things to get us out of this. Pandemic does that, what is somehow turned into people weaponizing it for political gain when it comes to we really had messages from from a group, right? The briefings came from the White House. Dr. Fauci at NIH HHS and sometimes the Surgeon General as well as you Spell, funeralized director of the CDC. How did that decision to make it a group in a briefing versus? Did you argue for example, that the CDC should be the voice that there should be a single voice and would not have helped in terms of reducing some of the confusion and the misperception there, if the public had kind of one place to go? Yeah, I think one could say that, you know, how did that? How was it? How were those decisions made it was intentional because very much we were all on the same page and we wanted to make sure that America heard that all of us were on the same page that the scientists it. And I ate and the Surgeon General and HHS and CDC, we were in agreement with the things that we were staying and that unit to find message. I think is really critically important, especially when the other message out there was this is confusing. So, we really wanted to have one voice. One scientific voice from the scientific agencies. You have said that something like covid-19 is too big for a single agency, like CBC to manage alone. And that, you know, you can't make us there can't be a good solution in isolation. Like an agency can act and isolation, I wonder if you can comment on and help the public better understand what the CDC can and cannot do. You know, I think a lot of the criticism of the agency has come from expectations that the public had, you know, on what the CDC should be doing or telling them, I wonder, if you could help us understand a bit like a better understanding of what the agency 10 doing, what, I can't, I really appreciate this question because I think that this is lost on not only every day, I know the American public but even scientists who are engaged and asking for, for things from CBC. So I guess, and this is among the things we are doing so much work and CDC moving forward, but among the things, Graphing for Congressional help on so that we can be a Nimble agency. We have real challenges in our Workforce and the authorities that we have in our work force, our ability to pay overtime, our ability to pay danger, pay if we have an employee, that is working in a bowl of lading District, you know, helping a community. We can't do those sorts of things. It is very hard to be nimble with a response based work for us when we don't have a capacity weigh other response, based agencies have so Workforce has a real challenge. The other one has data, we do not we receive data voluntarily at CDC though. We have 3000 jurisdictions, that send us data sometimes it's standardized. Sometimes it's not sometimes it comes back, sometimes my email sometimes by web. So there are lots of different ways that we receive data and we cannot compel that day that Thursday that have come to us during the public health emergency. We were able to get more data because of the public health emergency, but one of the things I really have become accustomed to saying is when people ask, we want to see the data from CDC. Please also asked the question, the CDC actually, opted, get the data that you're looking to get from CDC. Because oftentimes, we don't, I'm, and that is really, we, we want those dated to come in a privacy protected way. We don't want an individual information, but we do want to be able to stay in jurisdiction acts. There's an outbreak next to in jurisdiction. Why? You should be looking for it too. If those data don't come to us and CDC, we can't put it back out to to Jose Tequilas at the state and local Health departments and you held the agency. You know what, you said a very historic moment and arguably, we're kind of at the tail end of that. Now, why did you decide now is the time to step down while? So it's been it's been an extraordinary 10 year when I came in, it was really about getting the agency to country in the world out of the darkest days. The pandemic we have been conquering race of infectious threats. I think unlike any we have seen throughout history, certainly, I knew I was coming into a conqueror covid-19 and Alta monkeypox came first, a case of parallel polio in the country. Assumed an ebola outbreak in Uganda to Marburg. Outbreaks in Equatorial, Guinea in Tanzania. The rate of Public Health. Threats has really been enormous over the last two-and-a-half years. One of the other things that we really did during my tenure was CDC moving forward, and that is sort of our strategy and plan for how we take, where we are in public health at CDC, and across the country, and payment to be the public health agency of the future. What is said that we've the lessons that we learn CDC has been around only for 76 years. They weren't around for the last pandemic. I'm so what is it that we have learned? How do we become the public health agency? That the America deserves and desires until we did a lot of that work over the last year. And I feel like I've charted the course. Now for what we need to do in the future, much of that work has already been accomplished done, is is ongoing. And you know what became very clear to me was that this work will take longer than a year. It'll take longer than two. We need to be able to be adaptable as new scientific movies or merge. And so, it's important to me, was to have a legacy where I talked about what do we need to be doing, what is the this inflection point? And so we want that. But I also think that we have done a lot of work in the agency to demonstrate where you know where we can fill voids and communication and fill it with important scientific information. So that when that void is there that we filled it before some nefarious actor may come in and fill it for us until I think of that has been critically important. This is going to be something that we have to keep a very close eye on because Are people who are very much want to undermine and it's not the CDC and it's not just NIH. It is all of Academia and all of science. That is really struggling with this right now. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6294762/how-covid-19-affects-brain-memory/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6294762/how-covid-19-affects-brain-memory/"},"headline":"Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand COVID-19's Effect On the Brain","datePublished":"2023-07-17T14:50:09.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:51:04.871Z","description":"COVID-19 can have profound effects on the brain, leading to neurocognitive symptoms like brain fog, memory loss, and even dementia.","url":"https://time.com/6294762/how-covid-19-affects-brain-memory/","keywords":["COVID-19","healthscienceclimate"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbb62707fadf7c03e/698a3eb347ca3810bb3baf6d/covid-19-brain.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jamie Ducharme","jobTitle":"Ducharme is a contributor to TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbb62707fadf7c03e/698a3eb347ca3810bb3baf6d/covid-19-brain.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Coronavirus in the brain","caption":"Coronavirus in the brain","creditText":"Getty Image","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/covid-19/","name":"COVID-19"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6294762/how-covid-19-affects-brain-memory/","name":"Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand COVID-19's Effect On the Brain"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"It's Been a Pretty Rocky Road.' 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