Long COVID's brain mystery just got turned upside down…

Long COVID's brain mystery just got turned upside down; it's not inflammation. It's fear. Neuroimaging scans in long COVID patients found no widespread brain inflammation. What they found instead may completely reshape how we treat it. For three years, the dominant theory was simple: SARS-CoV-2 infects the brain, triggers persistent neuroinflammation, and that inflammation drives the fog, fatigue, and depression that afflict millions of long COVID patients worldwide. A new study published in the Journal of Neurology has now scanned that theory and the scans don't support it. Researchers at the University of Turku, Finland, used advanced TSPO-PET neuroimaging, specifically sensitive to glial activa