As the COVID-19 pandemic enters the third year, new studies have found that the long-lasting effects of a COVID-19 infection can impact the brain as well as other vital parts of the body.
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Dr. Ziyad Al-Ali, Chief of Research and Development at the Saint Louis VA Hospital and Director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System, told KCBS Radio's "Ask An Expert" coronavirus has the potential to affect every organ in the body.
"What we know about it now is that it can affect the brain and in some people it can result in brain fog or impact how they remember things," he said.
Not only does long COVID-19 impact the brain, but it also has the potential to damage other organs in the body, including causing prolonged fatigue, weakness, heart disease and new-onset diabetes, Al-Ali said.
"It can literally affect every organ in the body," he warned. "There's not one organ that we looked at over the past couple years in people with long COVID and not seen it affected."
The findings are based on studies that have been done on people with long COVID-19 and control groups around the same age and gender as the test subjects. "What we found is the people who get COVID-19 actually express a higher risk of these problems down the road," Al-Ali said.
The negative impacts are even seen in COVID-19 patients who are at peak health with no former risk factors like smoking, obesity or high blood pressure. "Some of them are coming back to the clinics with these profound consequences, heart attack, blood clots, stroke, new onset diabetes," he said. "It's happening even in people who have no risk factors what-so-ever before they got COVID-19, so COVID-19 is driving that risk and resulting in these consequences."
Al-Ali said the long-term effects are variable. Some people are reporting that their brain fog and fatigue have lifted after experiencing the symptoms over time, however, some are not.
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