There are times where one would rather not be right, where saying “I told you so” is a Pyrrhic victory.
My doctor, viewing the MRI results of my brain that showed varied, diffuse areas of volume loss, said that the imaging had opened his eyes. For months, since at least September, I had been trying to sound an alarm to the medical professionals around me that something terribly was wrong and that we needed to test to find out what it was.
My doctor of nearly a decade had floated the idea that maybe it was a functional neurological disorder—that, while I wasn’t malingering, there was no five-alarm fire, that this was behavior that my body was generating itself in response to stress. The more alarmed I became at this lack of being taken seriously, the further I seemed to confirm his diagnosis. Hysteria, hypochondriasis—to him, it all seemed to fit.
I would rather have not gotten the results that showed such extensive, far-flung damage—in fact, I wish we could have moved forward months ago with this imaging order so that we could have had a better view of the path ahead. Further than that, I firmly believe we had a chance to head some of this off at the pass had my doctor been willing at the time to move more aggressively at the first sign of this suite of symptoms.
I would rather have not been right.
Am I correct in presuming, as I have for many months now, that this damage is sequential to Covid infection? I still feel justified in deducing this, though we still await substantive proof. I kick myself for not using a rapid test during the testing window (though, of course, a false negative was always a possibility in that case—only a full PCR test would have been definitive anyway). Had I tested, firm evidence in hand, I may have been able to circumvent a lot of this subsequent milling around on my doctor’s part. Still, all this time, I could point to a timeline of events to demonstrate a plausible proximate cause. I fell ill in July, and all of these neurological issues cropped up after the fact.
Another timeline I’ve been considering is that of the country since Covid broke out. Three years after the advent of the disease, we’ve gone through several waves of infection, some (such as the initial wave and that of Delta) especially devastating. Some of us have been able to dodge Covid, while some of us unluckily enough were stricken with breakthrough infections despite precautionary measures such as multiple vaccinations and social distancing.
But there too has been a stubborn slice of the populace that has resisted vaccination, indeed has denied Covid’s existence; these people represent the most vulnerable on this score, the most exposed: they may have been infected and infected again, many times over by now. Some experts believe that reinfection may be its own category of danger, representing a segment of the population which may see particularly harmful effects from repeated exposure.
I’ve highlighted several research findings released in the last year where experts have detailed certain high-level hazards associated with contracting Covid. Of note, I remarked when researchers out of UC Davis showed that SARS-CoV-2 can directly invade the brain through the nose; and also when other researchers found that Covid was associated with Alzheimers’-like disease.
These findings, concerning when considered in part, add up to a disturbing account when viewed as a full picture. Fernández-Castañeda et al. (Cell, 2022) spoke of an “emerging crisis of lasting cognitive impairment associated with Covid” directly due “to the magnitude of the population infected during this pandemic.”
Last year I also called attention to a Nature study involving the UK Biobank that showed clear before-and-after imaging of patients’ own brains in the wake of Covid infection. (These patients were also matched to healthy controls; it was an elegantly designed study.) The results showed widespread shrinkage of overall brain matter volume, and specific areas show extensive damage.
Charting these noted brain regions of interest (ROIs) against another pathology with associated peculiarities—psychopathy—I made it easy to compare side-by-side the clear similarities of the regions of damage common to both maladies.
Shared Brain Areas
|
Psychopathy |
Covid-19 dysfunction |
Amygdala
|
✓ |
✓ |
hippocampus |
✓ |
✓ |
parahippocampal gyrus |
✓ |
✓ |
anterior cingulate cortex |
✓ |
✓ |
posterior cingulate cortex |
✓ |
|
striatum |
✓ |
✓ |
insula |
✓ |
✓ |
frontal cortex |
✓ |
✓ |
temporal cortex |
✓ |
✓ |
olfactory tubercle |
|
✓ |
olfactory nucleus |
|
✓ |
cerebellum |
|
✓ |
While this was not definitive of a connection between the two (and in no case can be generalized to a person), the comparison did suggest that an association may exist, and that it may do so at the organic level.
I’d pointed out in that article (as well as in a handful of others) indicators that people in our society were committing strange public acts, many of them violent. The vast majority of the stories I encountered I never even diaried, because that’s a bit macabre and might appear somewhat excessive (also, there’s little chance that my stumbling upon these individual news stories constituted a representative sample of these odd incidents). But certainly it seemed like violent behavior in our communities was on the rise. And we’ve all seen the surge in mass shootings and what some commentators have dubbed “wrong place” murders, those undertaken with the barest of intent or even a moment’s second thought.
Where has this spike of violence come from? We must ask the question in order to generate solutions. Could it be something other than Covid? Of course—we’ve seen social stressors become inflamed before. But many of the factors offered as possible reasons have occurred in both the distant and recent past, and they have not been sufficient to trigger the behavior we’ve seen. Inflation and scarcity of funds? We not too long ago went through the Great Recession and we saw none of this violence, not on this scale. Propaganda, too, has been around all this time, as have environmental “hazards” such as gory movies and violent video games. These variables, while they may or may not contribute to our current climate, cannot be sufficient for what we see all around us at this moment.
To my point, several of the brain areas affected in Covid include very particular areas of the frontal lobe. Not only might that seat of executive function suffer what’s known as hypofrontality (where the tissue just doesn’t generate enough power), damage to areas such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) can affect valuations of worth and consequence. A person with OFC damage can exhibit in some instances an apathy but in others a disinhibition, a freeing of shackles on their social behavior.
People suffering from frontotemporal dementia (the same disease that now afflicts Bruce Willis) often breach social etiquette, disregarding elements of social space, sometimes touching people in inappropriate ways (often in a sexual manner). OFC damage sometimes manifests as an inability to learn from mistakes, a perseveration of error even when the correct procedure is later demonstrated. Value becomes harder to calculate, and jumping to conclusions becomes even easier to accomplish than it normally would. Risk-taking can come to be second nature.
That’s just one ROI out of many that Covid can compromise. This releasing of fetters absolutely could go toward explaining at least some of what we’re seeing unfold.
Indeed, late last year, I’d noted that, in sum, a handful of researchers seemed to point to the outside possibility of Covid being associated with damage similar to that seen in some instances of human prion disorders. (The most famous prion outbreak among people was what was called “mad cow disease” in Britain in the ‘90s. Chronic wasting disease is rampant here in the US but appears limited to deer.) I was called out for advancing such a claim (though I had merely synthesized what others were saying), so I collated the information in a rather long and involved post that stayed up in the Featured section here for a respectable amount of time. That was posted in January.
In February, just two weeks after I’d posted, a research team presented theoretical findings that directly supported my proposition. The authors, in the main, show how the healthy prion protein, present in all human brains, may become deformed in the presence of the spike protein. (Importantly, one of the sources upon which their theory resides emphasizes that a naive—that is, unvaccinated—subject would be most implicated in this instance due to the sheer copy numbers of the spike protein that can be generated, and that the same protein introduced via the vaccine would not be found in such numbers and thus would most probably not be sufficient in those who are vaccinated to kick off the process of degeneration.) Here, again, I would rather not be right—but, in the chance that I may be correct, I remind readers that prion disease is swift, running a course of a year or so until finality.
Similarly, the neurodegeneration possibly “unmasked” by Covid has been described as progressive, where Alzheimer’s-like diseases might strike in a two-year time frame instead of that of twenty. Also, these dementias are mixed: some symptoms in a single patient might resemble a hodge-podge drawn from Parkinson’s disease, corticobasal disease, frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer’s, dementia with Lewy bodies, and others.
Some of you may be thinking: Is it the guns? With respect to the increase in gun violence, that factor can’t be ignored. More people have gotten their hands on firearms with fewer restrictions. Yet some violence we’ve seen recently has been extremely “intimate,” meaning it’s occurred in close bodily proximity with implements of knives or even bear spray. Keep in mind, too, the instances where individuals apparently have utilized their vehicles as weapons to mow down entire swaths of people. The variety of violent means we’ve seen deployed is rather staggering.
Is it the media? I have my own take on this, which I hope to detail more at length later; but I do think that our current environment differs from what we’ve seen in the past. I believe that first-person modes of gaming probably affect the brain differently from games presented in the third person. (By that, I mean the perspective must affect how the player responds to the stimuli presented and, thus, how that information is recalled in memory.) I also think that the headspace generated by shared online spaces is one that is woefully unexplored in our wider culture, and that the plugging in of oneself into these spaces may tip the scales for some, especially if they join particularly polarized online communities.
But could Covid explain some, much, or even the vast majority of the strange behavior we’re witnessing all around us? I believe there’s a good chance that’s true. And while I hope one day to be able to look back and say, “That’s one time I’m glad I wasn’t right,” so far that does not seem something I can yet say.