How does COVID-19 change the brain? This scientist is finding out
NEW YORK — In a room as cold as a refrigerator, Dr. Maura Boldrini bends over a plastic box filled with pale slices of human brain, each piece nestled in its own tiny, fluid-filled compartment.
She gestures with purple-gloved fingers: Here are the folds of the cortex, where higher cognition takes place. There is the putamen, which helps our limbs move. Here is the emotion-processing amygdala, with its telltale bumps.
Each piece in this box came from a single brain — one whose owner died of COVID-19.
There are dozens more containers just like it stacked in freezers in Boldrini's lab at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
"Each of these boxes is one person," she says in a lilting Italian accent. Each will play a crucial role in helping to unravel COVID-19's impacts on the brain.
The disease may be best known for its ability to rob people of their breath, but as the pandemic spread, patients began reporting a disconcerting array of cognitive and psychiatric issues — memory lapses, fatigue and a mental fuzziness that became known as brain fog.
