The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded a five-year R01 grant to Serena Spudich, MD, Gilbert H. Glaser Professor of Neurology; Todd Constable, PhD, Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Radiology; and Lindsay McAlpine, MD, assistant professor of neurology; for their proposed research, “Understanding Circuit Dysfunction in Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection.”
The new grant will support research that employs novel neuroimaging techniques to understand the changes to the brain that occur alongside Long COVID symptoms. It is part of the Covid Mind Study at Yale, a multidisciplinary research project that studies persistent effects of COVID-19 on the brain.
Appearing weeks to a month after acute COVID-19 infection, the symptoms of Long COVID are numerous and can be debilitating. “The most common neurologic symptoms include headache, dizziness, impaired executive function, slowed cognitive processing, poor working and declarative memory, and neuropathic pain and numbness,” says McAlpine.
To understand the mechanisms driving such elusive symptoms, emerging research, including studies published in The Lancet Regional Health: Western Pacific and Brain, is using neuroimaging to identify changes in certain areas of the brain in individuals who experience the cognitive symptoms of Long COVID.
The current study will further investigate these mechanisms by applying state-of-the-art-tools developed at Yale to understand changes to brain circuits in a large number of participants. The team is building upon an existing method that they had previously introduced in Nature Neurosciences.
“This approach allows us to understand the functional organization of the brain and how it’s related to behavior,” says Constable. “Using these novel tools, we can build predictive models that allow us to bring in an individual patient and understand their symptoms by assessing specific brain circuits.”
Treatment options for Long COVID are under intensive study, but to date, there are no directly targeted therapies for Long COVID. The team hopes that the findings of this study will contribute to more individualized and targeted treatments for Long COVID.