COVID-19 may infect the respiratory centre of the brains, nervous system says CSIR researchers

A team of researchers at CSIR - Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB), Kolkata has explored the neuro-invasive potential of COVID-19 and suggested that the virus may infect the respiratory centre of the brain, a statement said.

The researchers have also suggested that attention should be focused on the respiratory centre of the central nervous system to learn about mortality due to coronavirus.

The paper published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience and supported by Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB), a statutory body of the Department of Science & Technology (DST), implies that coronavirus could enter the human brain through the nose and reach the olfactory bulb of the brain.

From there, the virus might infect PreBotzinger complex (PBC), the primary centre of the brain that controls the respiratory rhythm generation. This explains that the collapse of the respiratory centre in the brain may be responsible for the breakdown of COVID-19 patients.

The team of researchers comprising Dr Prem Tripathi, Dr Upasana Ray, Dr Amit Srivastava and Dr Sonu Gandhi suggested that while the lung is one of the most infected organs, several other organs, including the brain, are also affected by COVID-19.

This is the first report that highlights that SARS-CoV-2 may target the PBC of the brainstem that controls respiration and causes the respiratory collapse of COVID-19 patients, the statement added.
The scientists have suggested that cerebrospinal fluid of COVID-19 patients and postmortem of the brain of the deceased should be assessed to better understand the route of SARS-CoV-2 entry and its spread to the respiratory centre of the brain.

The PreBotzinger complex functions as the primary respiratory oscillator and it has been proposed as a centre of respiration. It has been earlier shown that disruption of PBC causes lethality due to respiratory failure, suggesting its central role in respiratory rhythm generation.

“It is possible that SARS-CoV-2 may shut down the respiratory centre, and in turn breathing by infecting and destroying the PBC of the brainstem,” it said, adding that this hypothesis needs to be validated for SARS-CoV-2.

Another recent study from a group of scientists at King's College London, UK highlighting that loss of smell was one of the main symptoms of COVID-19 patients, hinting at the involvement of the same route through which coronavirus may enter the brain.

The study highlights that it is important to not only screen the COVID-19 patients for neurological symptoms but also further segregate when the symptom appears.

The researchers have pointed out that while at present, the brain is not considered as the site of the primary or secondary reason for the death of a COVID-19 patient, attention needs to be focused towards the brain''s respiratory centre.

“Postmortem of brain of COVID-19 patients could be assessed to know the route of entry and affected areas including detailed assessment of respiratory centre of the brain,” the statement added.

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Obesity can weaken response to taste

Obesity is linked to a reduced response to taste, reveals a recent study.

According to the study,' taste perception is known to change with obesity, but the underlying neural changes remain poorly understood.

"It is surprising that we know so little about how taste is affected by obesity, given that the taste of food is a big factor in determining what we choose to eat," said a professor of psychology.

To address this issue, a team of researchers aimed to detail the effects of obesity on responses to taste stimuli in the nucleus tractus solitarius, a part of the brain involved with taste processing.

The researchers recorded the responses to taste stimuli from single cells in the brainstem of rats that were made obese by feeding a high-fat diet.

They found that taste responses in these obese rats were smaller in magnitude, shorter in duration and took longer to develop, compared with those in lean rats.

The results suggested that a high-fat diet produces blunted, but more prevalent, responses to taste in the brain and a weakened association of taste responses with ingestive behaviour.

While the researcher stressed that these findings currently only apply to rats, she said that this same process could possibly translate to humans.

"Others have found that the number of taste buds on the tongue is diminished in obese mice and humans, so the likelihood that taste response in the human brain is also blunted is good," said the researcher.

 

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Hunger-controlling brain cells can tackle obesity

A team of researchers has discovered two new types of cell in the brain that can potently regulate appetite and offer new drugs to treat obesity. Researchers  have revealed that there are two types of cells which are located in the part of the brainstem known as the dorsal raphe nucleus, that have the capability to treat obesity by controlling the hunger signals that instill the search for and consumption of food.

The results indicated that the part of the brain played a role in feeding behavior. Researchers have conducted a study on mice's dorsal raphe nucleus or DRN when whole-brain imaging made with iDISCO, revealed that this part of the brain becomes activated in hungry mice.

"The recent data suggest that modulation of the activity of specific neurons with drugs could bypass leptin resistance and provide a new means for reducing body weight," said a researcher.
 
Subsequent imaging of other mice that were fed more than their normal amount of food, until they were fully revealed a different pattern of DRN activity. "One is that the cells are just along for the ride--they are getting activated by hunger but they're not actually driving the food intake process. The other possibility is that they are in fact part of the sense and response mechanism to hunger--and in this case, we suspected the latter," he added.

They also studied the effect of switching off hunger neurons in obese mice. Another researcher stated said that prolonged inhibition of these neurons could dramatically reduce weight.

New findings disclosed how the brain controls eating, and suggest that drugs designed to activate or inhibit neurons in the DRN could be effective in treating obesity and preventing its related disorders, such as diabetes and hypertension.

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Learning to read in adulthoood transforms brain

A study of women in India who learned to read in their 30s shows the human brain’s incredible capacity to reorganize and transform itself, researchers said on Wednesday.

Researchers recruited women in India, where the illiteracy rate is around 39%, to see what they could learn about the areas of the brain devoted to reading.

At the start of the study, most of the women could not read a word of their mother tongue, Hindi. But after six months of training, the women reached a level comparable to first-grade proficiency.

“This growth of knowledge is remarkable”, said Falk Huettig from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, lead author of the study in the journal Science Advances.
 

Researchers found that reorganisation took place deep inside the brain, particularly in the brainstem and thalamus.

“While it is quite difficult for us to learn a new language, it appears to be much easier for us to learn to read. The adult brain proves to be astonishingly flexible.”

Specifically, researchers found that the exterior of the brain – known as the cortex, which is able to adapt quickly to new challenges – was not the main area where transformation occurred. Instead, researchers found that reorganisation took place deep inside the brain, particularly in the brainstem and thalamus, a walnut-sized structure that relays sensory and motor information.

“We observed that the so-called colliculi superiores, a part of the brainstem, and the pulvinar, located in the thalamus, adapt the timing of their activity patterns to those of the visual cortex,” said co-author Michael Skeide, scientific researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.

“These deep structures in the thalamus and brainstem help our visual cortex to filter important information from the flood of visual input even before we consciously perceive it.

Researchers found that the more signals aligned in the affected brain regions, the better the women’s reading skills became. “These brain systems increasingly fine-tune their communication as learners become more and more proficient in reading,” Skeide added.

“This could explain why experienced readers navigate more efficiently through a text.”

The finding could also have implications for the treatment of dyslexia, which some researchers have blamed on a malfunctioning thalamus. “Since we found out that only a few months of reading training can modify the thalamus fundamentally, we have to scrutinise this hypothesis,” Skeide said.

Co-authors on the study came from India’s Centre of Bio-Medical Research (CBMR) Lucknow and the University of Hyderabad.

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