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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Neuroimaging
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1412020
This article is part of the Research Topic Neural Circuitry Related to Neuropsychiatric Manifestations in COVID-19 View all 3 articles

Structural MRI correlates of Cognitive and Neuropsychiatric symptoms in Long COVID: A Pilot Study

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Department of Neurology, Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States
  • 2 Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Approximately 7% of COVID-19 patients (1.3% children) have exhibited symptoms of post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), or Long COVID, and 20% of those present with neuropsychiatric symptoms. While a large number of MRI-based neuroimaging studies in this population have shown cortical atrophy in terms of gray matter volume and cortical thickness in patients, there is a growing body of work showing brain volume enlargements or thickness increases in patients compared to COVID negative controls. To investigate this further, we used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine differences in gray matter thickness for the cortical limbic and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortical regions between patients with Long COVID and healthy controls. Results showed increased cortical thickness in the caudal anterior, isthmus, and the posterior cingulate gyrus as well as the rostral middle frontal gyrus respectively along with higher gray matter volume in the posterior cingulate and the isthmus cingulate in patients with Long COVID. Cortical thickness and gray matter volumes for regions of interest (ROIs) were also associated with the severity measures, clinical dementia rating, and anxiety scores in the Long COVID group. Our findings provide supporting evidence for cortical hypertrophy in Long COVID.

    Keywords: Long Covid, structural MRI, Brain, cortical thickness, cingulate gyrus

    Received: 04 Apr 2024; Accepted: 04 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Joshi, Siddarth and Lavretsky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Shantanu H Joshi, Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Department of Neurology, Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 90095, CA, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.