Are you suffering from long COVID chronic brain fatigue?
What are the manifestations of long COVID chronic brain fatigue?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, after being infected with these coronaviruses, some people experienced brain fog and fatigue. Many of them have combined symptoms of brain fog and fatigue. Such brain fatigue sometimes is continuous and sometimes intermittent, usually lasting for a long time, even up to more than a year, which is called long COVID chronic brain fatigue by the medicine community. According to statistics in the study report, approximately 10% of people infected with novel coronavirus developed long COVID symptoms, and patients with brain fatigue accounted for one-fourth of all patients with long COVID symptoms. That means about 2.5% of people infected with the coronavirus would experience chronic brain fatigue. According to published medical papers on long-term COVID of chronic fatigue, we concluded that the manifestations of chronic brain fatigue are as follows:
(1) Brain fatigue: feel that it is easy for the brain to be tired; feel listless; it is easy to feel tired when pondering; feel easily sleepy when reading, and feel sleepy easily during the day; feel that writing articles and counting numbers are difficult.
(2) Attention disorder: feel the lack of concentration; often in a trance state;it is difficult to concentrate on doing things;it is easy to distract from class and from listening to others’ speeches.
(3) Blurry vision: it is easy to experience blurry vision and dry eyes when reading articles on computer and mobile phone;feel fatigued when recognizing things through eyes; feel that eyes are pain caused by the sunshine, and when exposed to sunlight, one feels easily dizzy; feel eyeball fatigue when being close to looking at the smaller font of text or small details.
(4) Sleep disorder: difficulty in falling asleep, poor sleep quality, unable to recover the physical condition after sleep, and still feel fatigued after having sleep. it is easy to wake up or have insomnia, or feel drowsiness and it is difficult to wake up, while sleepiness and tiredness appearing during the day. The patient presented with the conditions of day and night reversal, staying up late, and feeling tired in the daytime and energetic at night.
What are the causes of the long COVID chronic brain fatigue after the COVID-19 infection?
According to the published medical papers on long covid chronic brain fatigue, Long Covid Care Center concluded that the pathogenesis of chronic brain fatigue after coronavirus infection can be explained according to the following development path:
(1) First, the response of the human immune system to the site of novel coronavirus infection is divided into two stages. In the preliminary stage, the immune system mobilizes macrophages and polymorphonuclear phagocytes (e.g. neutrophils, basophils, eosinophils) to rapidly reach the site of infection to control infection. In the following stages, the immune system of the human body takes about 4 days to establish adaptive immune mechanisms through learning, including T cell-mediated immune mechanisms to solve the infection, and the production B system-mediated antibody to clear the pathogen- the novel coronavirus, so as to prevent reinfection.
(2) Second, because novel coronavirus can easily mutate, so far as more and more coronavirus variants appear, and the ability of immune escape is increasing, this makes the effect decrease when the antigens (HLA) produced by the human immune system to clear novel coronavirus, which means there will be a small number of novel coronavirus immune escape. Novel coronavirus in some patients has not yet been completely cleared, but because the human immune system is suppressing these coronaviruses, leading the content of novel coronavirus too small to make PCR tests negative.
(3) Third, there are trace viruses that escaped in the human body in the long term, which will persistently infect and invade human tissue cells, causing tissue damage. Tissue damage, in turn, triggers chronic inflammation. This chronic inflammation is produced by a persistent immune response, also causing persistent massive cytokine diffusion.
(4) The continuous breakdown of a large number of cytokine proteins can lead to autoimmunity. Autoimmunity refers to the immune response produced by organisms against healthy cells and tissues of their bodies. Any disease caused by this immune abnormality is called autoimmune disease.
(5) The persistence of trace novel coronavirus continues to deteriorate the situation, leading to T cell failure and immune memory defects. Defects in immune memory can make the immune system gradually insensitive to immune pathways that eliminate novel coronavirus, eventually becoming a coexisting state. This condition is characterized by generalized diffuse chronic inflammation. In the long run, the function of body organs and tissues is reduced.
(6) For patients infected with novel coronaries, some people experienced the virus breaking through the blood-brain barrier and invading nerve cells in the brain. Evidence has been found that novel coronavirus triggers neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in the brain. This condition can further cause metabolic abnormalities in the brain, such as capillary microthrombi in the brain, nerve cell hypoxia in brain, and so on, which may be one of the causes of long chronic brain fatigue.
(7) Studies have shown that coronavirus can be transported to the forebrain through the olfactory bulb nerve, which in turn affects the levels of serotonin and dopamine in the forebrain, resulting in psychological and emotional changes in patients, sleep disorders and post-anxiety stress disorders, which may also be one of the causes of long-term chronic brain fatigue.
(8) Novel coronavirus has also been shown to infect the eye, causing eye inflammation, or optic nerve damage. Few patients with novel coronavirus infections experienced blurry vision because it can easily cause sensory brain fatigue.
