finally tonight four years after the global covid-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic millions of people are still suffering from one of the virus's worst side effects long covid and for some the debilitating brain fog it causes researchers at ruter University recently published one of the most detailed investigations into the symptom looking at how and why long covid causes some people to experience difficulty thinking or concentrating Dr William Who is the senior author of the study and he joins me now to share what his team discovered Doctor Who it's so good to have you on the show I think there are a lot of people who are interested in this topic what did the findings from your study show well thank you for having me I think the the the issue along Co is really a a huge one not only in New Jersey but across the country one of the biggest questions that that people asked me a number of years ago was What happened to people with L covid and we really didn't have a good understanding because the disease was so new so we recruited a group of people who were coming here to Ruckers for care and we followed them over time to see what happened to their memory issues or what many people call brain fog over time and over the course of two years about half the people experienced Improvement in their cognition what the other half did not so we're able to at least answer the question that you know there is some recovery but recovery is slow we also try to understand what the basis for this recovery was and so we recruited a subgroup of people to undergo spinal fluid collection and Analysis we did something that was fairly extraordinary that we were able to collect all the immune cells in the spinal fluid that were in contact with the brain and when were able to study the genes these cells and what we learned was that long covid was really very similar to acute infection acute SARS CO2 infection in the field there's a lot of debate about whether this is due to a post infectious autoimmune process whether this is a chronic infection or sadly whether this is all in the patient heads correct me if I'm wrong doctor because there were thoughts at least early on in the pandemic that perhaps the long Co the brain fog that you're speaking about maybe shared some similarities with um what we would find in Dementia or or Alzheimer's but but you're saying what you found contradicted that yeah absolutely um we we routinely see the people suffering from Alzheimer's disease or living with Alzheimer's disease so we have pretty precise markers and we did not find Alzheimer signatures in any way in in the in the a group of people with long covid um so we fairly convincingly excluded Alzheimer's as a potential mechanism for the brain fog so that's the good news um did you find anything about what might be helpful in terms of speeding up the recovery for folks who have long covid well from a biological biochemical perspective what we found is that people who were able to mount a strong immune reaction to fight the infection U they were better at clearing the the uh brain fog over time whereas if people fail to achieve this and this is this is a a biological pathway that's what's kind of directed Downstream from a molecule called interferon and if people were unable to mount this response then their brain fog never quite improved wow Dr William who is the senior author of a study at ruers University looking into long Co and brain fog specifically thank you so much for sharing your findings with us thank you for having me [Music]