![]() And that was extremely alarming because when we published that work and we saw this one chemokine, that seemed to be the culprit, causing a lot of the Microglial activation. We were still seeing chemical changes in the brain because of the proliferation of these these chemicals called chemokines that then went into the brain and caused damage to the microglia, the cells that hold together our brain cells. And that was followed up with a study about myself, Akiko Iwasaki We were both really fortunate to team up with Michelle Mungai from Stanford University, and we published a paper in showing that when you infect rodents with a mild form of COVID that only affects their lungs. Even if the person that they were studying didn't necessarily consider themselves to have long COVID. ![]() And they showed alarming changes in brain size as well as changes in cognitive function after a COVID infection. There was a truly alarming paper that was published in Nature about two years ago now where a bunch of scientists in the UK actually looked at brain imaging in not just people with long COVID, but everybody who had had COVID. Yeah, You know, we're starting to learn a lot more about what is happening in the brain during an acute COVID infection. Is it executive function? Is it short term memory? Is it long term memory? What what is the nature of the cognitive impairment that this person's reporting and let's measure it. It's not good enough to write down brain fog in your notes, you know. What is the nature of the fatigue? Same with cognitive impairment. But meanwhile, you're not really asking how how fatigued they are. You know, it's not good enough for a clinician to say, oh, you're fatigued, and then write down patient complains of fatigue. Let's measure your fatigue with a fatigue severity scale, because I want to know how much fatigue. And what that got us very good at was learning to characterize all the different symptoms that we were seeing because we were very exacting about it. In the early days when we had thousands of people on the app and several hundred were saying all of these symptoms, we didn't really need to say, Oh, that's that's long-covid and this is PTSD or, you know, or some sort of anxiety or depression due to, you know, very rightly sort of the world burning down around us or in the moment, we just had to say, okay, well, let's bring you in for an evaluation and let's let's talk through your symptoms and let's get a sense of what's going on. The the wonderful thing is we were running a clinical program which which gives us perfect license to say the one thing that all long COVID patients want to hear, which is, I believe you. 'Well, you know, control group is a term that we would use in research, Right.
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