The effects of COVID-19 on the brain are to be examined in a new groundbreaking study involving all four UK nations.
The COVID-19 Clinical Neuroscience Study (COVID-CNS) will look at 800 UK patients who were admitted to hospital with COVID-19 and had neurological or neuropsychiatric complications, to understand how these problems occur and develop strategies to prevent and treat them.
The first-of-its-kind project involves more than a dozen research centres from across the UK and forms an integral part of the National Institute of Health Research BioResource, which provides research infrastructure to speed up clinical research and clinical trials.
COVID-CNS has been awarded £2.3m by UK Research and Innovation and the Department of Health and Social Care to help advance its work, which is led by the University of Liverpool in collaboration with King’s College London.
“COVID-19 patients frequently suffer brain complications during the infection and are left with brain injuries which can have lifelong consequences,” says project co-lead Dr Benedict Michael, senior clinician scientist fellow at the University of Liverpool and consultant neurologist at The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust.
“Similar problems have been seen in previous pandemics, including Spanish influenza over 100 years ago, but how and why this occurs remains poorly understood.
“Without understanding how the virus causes these problems, we are not able to know which existing medications to use or to develop new medications to treat these neurological effects. We’re going to look at cases in detail, exploring clinical data, and laboratory and imaging markers of brain inflammation and injury.”
“These brain complications of severe COVID-19 infection could cause long terms problems for patients and their families,” says project co-lead Professor Gerome Breen, professor of Psychiatric Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London.
“We want to compare patients with these complications to similarly ill hospitalised patients who did not have these problems. We will monitor their outcomes and integrate social and environmental risk factors into our analyses alongside all the biology information we will measure.
“This project brings together scientists and clinicians in all four UK nations, across neurology, psychiatry, genetics, epidemiology and immunology. By working together, we aim to rapidly improve our understanding and design better treatments.”
The Stroke Association is part of the project’s Patient and Public Involvement Strategy.
Dr Richard Francis, head of research, adds: “We are pleased to be supporting such a crucial COVID-19 research study.
“We know that patients around the country are suffering the effects of this awful pandemic so to be part of a study that can help us understand these after-effects better, and even prevent this happening to other people, is enormously important.”
