The collaboration behind a study on COVID-19 neurological complications
My name is Cordelia and I’m a postdoc in the Infection Neuroscience lab led by Professor Benedict Michael at the University of Liverpool. This paper on the neurological complications of COVID-19 is the result from a large collaboration of healthcare professionals and scientists across many centres in the U.K and also Switzerland (the ISARIC4C and COVID-CNS consortia). The COVID-Clinical Neuroscience Study is led by Professor Benedict Michael (University of Liverpool) and Professor Gerome Breen (King’s College London) and includes over 800 participants—with both COVID-19 controls and COVID-associated neurological complications.
The project was steered by the Biomarkers and Immunology working group leaders: Professors David Menon (University of Cambridge) and Leonie Taams (King’s College London) with authors at institutes around the U.K and from Switzerland.
With a core group of investigators meeting online every week, we consistently made progress on the project. From the initial meetings where we narrowed down what hypotheses to test through to years of working together and going over data, we benefitting from everyone’s different expertise to carry out the assays to understand the immune response following COVID-19 and markers associated with neurological complications.
Of course, this study would not have been possible without all the participants who kindly gave their time and effort to the COVID-Clinical Neuroscience study and all the healthcare professionals and research assistants who recruited the participants. The strengths of this study include having large numbers of participants from multiple centres with a range of neurological complications and in-depth clinical information.
In this study, we found six immune mediators including pro-inflammatory cytokines in blood associated with brain dysfunction at early timepoints following hospitilisation for COVID-19. However, at later timepoints, these immune mediators were no longer elevated in blood, but that does not rule out ongoing local inflammation. Conversely, we found that brain injury markers remained elevated in patient’s blood even months after COVID-19 infection, particularly in those who experienced a neurological complication. This indicates ongoing damage and highlights useful markers to be used in future studies. We are interested in further understanding the mechanisms and investigating therapeutic strategies.
It has been a wonderful experience to get timely feedback from the working group and have lively brainstorming sessions. We are already working on more projects together, so it continues to be a great collaboration.
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