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  • NEWS FEATURE

How COVID-19 can damage the brain

Some people who become ill with the coronavirus develop neurological symptoms. Scientists are struggling to understand why.
  1. Michael Marshall

    1. Michael Marshall is a science writer based in Devon, UK.

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View through the bottom of a laboratory dish being held by a scientist containing brain organoids seen as small white dots

Some evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can infect the brain comes from ‘organoids’ — clumps of neurons created in a dish. Credit: Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego

The woman had seen lions and monkeys in her house. She was becoming disoriented and aggressive towards others, and was convinced that her husband was an impostor. She was in her mid-50s — decades older than the age at which psychosis typically develops — and had no psychiatric history. What she did have, however, was COVID-19. Hers was one of the first known cases of someone developing psychosis after contracting the disease1.

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Nature 585, 342-343 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02599-5

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