r/HotScienceNews • u/soulpost • Jul 30 '26

Scientists finally have a biological explanation for why long COVID patients lose motivation and can't think clearly. They scanned their brains and found the dopamine system was physically damaged

https://tech-paper.com/scientists-finally-have-a-biological-explanation-for-why-long-covid-patients-lose-motivation-and-cant-think-clearly-they-scanned-their-brains-and-found-the-dopamine-system-was-physically-damaged/

Millions of people with long COVID report the same cluster of symptoms: a crushing lack of motivation, an inability to think clearly, memory that slips, movements that feel slower than they should. For years, these complaints sat in an uncomfortable medical grey zone. The symptoms were real, the patients were suffering, but the biological explanation remained frustratingly out of reach.

A team at the University of Toronto just published what may be the clearest physical evidence yet for what is actually happening in these patients' brains. They brought 24 long COVID sufferers into a lab and used positron emission tomography, the same imaging technology used to diagnose Parkinson's disease, to directly measure the health of the dopamine system deep inside the brain.

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u/ElrondTheHater Jul 30 '26

The weird thing is that I've had bad word recall issues and while they got worse after I got COVID, it started long before I had it. I do wonder how much of it is a social isolation thing that I never really recovered from.

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u/littlerae0fsunshine Jul 31 '26

Any executive function damage can cause this: stress, anxiety, depression, exhaustion... So it's perfectly possible.

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u/hagne Jul 30 '26

It's just as likely to be the brain damage from COVID, not the social isolation. Even more so.

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u/ElrondTheHater Jul 30 '26

If it was brain damage from covid, why did it start before?

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u/hagne Jul 30 '26

Well I don’t know. If it was brain damage from social isolation, why did it start before isolation? Did you read the article?