COVID: Can virus spread to heart & brain days after infection? Here's what new study says

COVID-19 can spread to the heart and brain several days after infection in a patient, and beyond the respiratory tract into the organs where it can survive there for months causing the debilitating side effects and long coronavirus symptoms, a new study has found. Researchers from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) claim in their news study found that the COVID-19 can cause multi-organ dysfunction in case of acute infection and lead to prolonged symptoms experienced by some patients termed by the scientists as ‘Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC)’.

However, the intensity of this spread of infection outside the respiratory tract and the time to viral clearance is not well known to the researchers. But the scientists say that the non-respiratory organs may have less efficient immune responses to the virus and therefore the virus clearance in other organs including the heart and brain may take up to 12 or more weeks among the patients. Earlier, a New York Times report had also shockingly revealed how several patients, who have had COVID-19 disease, were showing psychotic symptoms across the United States, including at South Oaks Hospital in New York, which ran a psychiatric treatment program for in-house COVID-19 patients. Dr. Hisam Goueli at the South Oaks Hospital told the reporters that he had seen at least four patients with no history of mental illness demonstrating psychotic symptoms after recovering from COVID-19 disease. 

"The chances of having long-term symptoms does not seem to be linked to how ill you are when you first get COVID-19. People who had mild symptoms at first can still have long-term problems," researchers explain.

Scientists performed the autopsies on 44 patients with COVID-19 in order to map and quantify SARS-CoV-2 virus distribution in the patients’ bodies, its replication, and cell-type specificity in the organs, including the brain. They studied the patients who suffered from acute COVID-19 infection for nearly seven months following symptom onset and found disturbing long COVID symptoms, particularly in the brain.

“We detected SARS-CoV-2 RNA in multiple anatomic sites, including regions throughout the brain, for up to 230 days following symptom onset,” scientists wrote in the study to be peer-reviewed for publication in the journal Nature. 

SARS-CoV-2 causes changes in 'brain'

There have been comprehensive studies in the past and clear evidence that SARS-CoV-2 causes profound molecular changes in the brain, which was detected in people who died of COVID-19.  "The signature the virus leaves in the brain speaks of strong inflammation and disrupted brain circuits and resembles signatures the field has observed in Alzheimer's or other neurodegenerative diseases," senior author Tony Wyss-Coray, Ph.D., professor of neurology and neurological sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, told Medscape Medical News.

In the new study, scientists at the US National Institutes of Health in Maryland found that the virus had actually spread well beyond the respiratory tract in patients of COVID-19 and traces were present in several other organs where they survived for over months. The delay in the virus clearance, as per the scientists, was the biggest contributor to long-haul COVID and caused “post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2,” which the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes is associated with a range of long-lasting symptoms among those that previously contracted the coronavirus. 

“The paper sheds some light and may help explain why long COVID can occur even in people who had the mild or asymptomatic acute disease,” Al-Aly, who has led separate studies into the long-term effects on COVID-19 said. “Our results collectively show that while the highest-burden of SARS-CoV-2 is in the airways and lung, the virus can disseminate early during infection and infect cells throughout the entire body, including widely throughout the brain,” a team, led by Daniel Chertow from NIH’s emerging pathogens section said in the study.