Science
After death, COVID-19 victims fight the disease by donating their brains
In a room as chilly as a fridge, Dr. Maura Boldrini bends over a plastic field stuffed with pale slices of human mind, every bit nestled in its personal tiny, fluid-filled compartment.
She gestures with purple-gloved fingers: Listed here are the folds of the cortex, the place larger cognition takes place. There may be the putamen, which helps our limbs transfer. Right here is the emotion-processing amygdala, with its telltale bumps.
Every bit on this field got here from a single mind — one whose proprietor died of COVID-19.
There are dozens extra containers identical to it stacked in freezers in Boldrini’s lab on the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
“Every of those containers is one individual,” she says in a lilting Italian accent. Every will play a vital function in serving to to unravel COVID-19’s results on the mind.
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The illness could also be finest identified for its capability to rob individuals of their breath, however because the pandemic unfold, sufferers started reporting a disconcerting array of cognitive and psychiatric points — reminiscence lapses, fatigue and a psychological fuzziness that grew to become often called mind fog. There have been additionally extra acute issues, together with paranoia, hallucinations, ideas of suicide and psychosis.
This unusual constellation of signs has led researchers to suspect that the illness is mounting a direct assault on the mind. Researchers wish to determine how — and what the assault’s long-term results could also be.
Boldrini, a neuroscientist at Columbia College, research the biology of suicide and the physiological markers of resilience in mind tissue. She can be a working towards psychiatrist.
That mixture makes her uniquely suited to analyze the underpinnings of “lengthy COVID.” She has gathered greater than 40 brains from COVID-19 victims to information her in her quest.
Dr. Maura Boldrini catalogs mind tissue from COVID-19 victims. “We now have numerous work to do,” she says.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Instances)
What Boldrini and her colleagues be taught might have implications far past COVID-19, shedding mild on psychological sickness, the origins of dementia and the myriad methods viral infections have an effect on the mind.
To unlock the illness’s secrets and techniques, they’ll must rigorously take every mind aside, depend its cells, observe its gene expression and doc its proteins.
“We now have numerous work to do,” Boldrini says.
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New York Metropolis was one of many coronavirus’ early targets, and it didn’t take lengthy for Boldrini to note shocking points amongst COVID-19 sufferers, together with severe temper and psychiatric signs.
“Very unusual signs,” she recollects — made even stranger as a result of they had been cropping up in individuals with no private or household historical past of such issues. Including to the thriller was the looks of those situations comparatively late in a affected person’s life reasonably than in adolescence and early maturity.
I really feel like this dread that I’m feeling is one thing natural in my mind, one affected person advised her. Psychologically, I’m not anxious about something.
“It’s a really completely different form of symptomatology in comparison with folks that have regular nervousness,” Boldrini says.
Boldrini explains her analysis on the psychiatric signs seen in COVID-19 sufferers. The illness could also be finest identified for its capability to rob individuals of their breath, however many sufferers report an array of cognitive and psychiatric points — reminiscence lapses, fatigue and a psychological fuzziness that grew to become often called mind fog.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Instances)
Then there have been the rarer, however extra disturbing, circumstances of suicidal ideation.
Boldrini has not encountered a COVID-19 affected person who died of suicide. However one case did hit her college near dwelling: Dr. Lorna Breen, an emergency division doctor at Columbia who labored on the entrance strains earlier than turning into sick herself in the course of the pandemic’s brutal first wave.
Breen was a proficient and devoted physician who took up snowboarding and salsa dancing in her spare time. Shortly after returning to work, her psychological well being deteriorated and he or she died by suicide inside weeks.
“She had COVID, and I consider that it altered her mind,” her sister Jennifer Feist mentioned on NBC’s “As we speak” final 12 months.
If that’s the case, how?
Researchers have discovered indicators that the virus can set up a foothold of types on the periphery of the mind, the place the protecting blood-brain barrier opens as much as permit key molecules to slide by way of. A kind of locations is the olfactory bulb, which might be reached by way of the nostril — a truth that would clarify why so many COVID-19 sufferers lose their sense of odor.
But scientists have to this point discovered little proof that the virus penetrates any deeper than that. As an alternative, they’ve seen the kind of injury brought on by strokes, in addition to the blood clots which will have precipitated them.
That’s a part of why Boldrini and plenty of others suspect that irritation — the immune system’s all-hands-on-deck response to an invader — could play a necessary function within the mind injury skilled by COVID-19 sufferers.
Irritation can set off blood clots, and as soon as a clot varieties, irritation will increase round it. It’s much like what’s seen in individuals who expertise traumatic mind damage, together with soccer gamers, navy veterans and victims of automobile accidents.
“Those that have this type of trauma within the mind have offered with sudden modifications in habits and character and suicide and different mind signs,” Boldrini says. It’s eerily much like what many COVID-19 sufferers face — and he or she doesn’t assume that’s a coincidence.
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To achieve a deeper understanding of what’s taking place on a mobile and molecular degree, scientists want to check the brains of people that died of COVID-19. However Boldrini prefers to not work with brains collected by others — she has to know every part about how the tissue was collected and preserved so she will perceive the outcomes of her experiments.
“Relying the way you freeze, retailer and repair the mind, you will get very completely different outcomes,” she says.
At Columbia, she and her colleagues study tissue from autopsies, in order that they have full management over how the valuable tissue is dealt with.
Boldrini needs to know which genes had been being expressed; to trace molecular markers of irritation; to see how microglia — the mind’s immune cells — had been behaving; and to doc the state of the neurons and their connections with each other.
Suzuka Nitta prepares mind tissue from a COVID-19 sufferer to be thinly sliced for examination.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Instances)
Mapping the multifaceted results of 1 illness is an formidable endeavor, and it requires painstaking work. One of many college students working within the lab begins by taking a scallop-edged pattern of the amygdala and mounting it on a mattress of dry ice. Drop by drop, she coats the tissue in sugar water, which finally freezes and holds the pattern in place.
Subsequent, she slices off items which might be a mere 50 microns thick — simply broad sufficient to comprise a single layer of mind cells. Every fragile lower is then submerged in water and centered on a glass slide with fine-tipped paintbrushes.
A pattern of mind tissue is mounted on a glass slide.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Instances)
The slides are stained with dyes that permit the researchers to see several types of cells within the tissue. These cells are counted beneath a microscope, partly by human eye and partly with the assistance of a pc algorithm.
Boldrini appears to be like over the coed’s shoulder at one of many slides magnified on a pc display. This slice of mind tissue resembles a galactic crush of stars stretched throughout a darkened sky: The scattered blue stars are glia, the mind’s protecting cells. The inexperienced ones are neurons, densely packed collectively. The purple stars are younger, immature neurons.
“It’s stunning,” Boldrini says. “Anatomy could be very stunning.”
Boldrini examines a picture of mind cells.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Instances)
The purple stars are the rarest of the three, and so they’re much more sparse in lots of sufferers who had COVID-19 — about 10 instances much less plentiful. That’s an issue as a result of these younger neurons are obligatory for studying and reminiscence, for dealing with stress, and for integrating reminiscences with feelings.
Boldrini suspects these immature cells are performed in by stress hormones and irritation.
“This might clarify the mind fog,” she says.
A number of days earlier, the researchers went by way of the identical steps with the hippocampus, a tiny, delicate mind construction concerned in temper and reminiscence.
Different scientists have discovered that COVID-19 damages the hippocampus. That would assist clarify why some sufferers have lingering points with melancholy and nervousness.
If this injury is brought on by irritation, it most likely wreaks havoc in a number of methods. Scientists suspect it disrupts the circulate of serotonin, a hormone that’s implicated in melancholy, and prompts the physique to make kynurenine as an alternative, despite the fact that it’s poisonous to neurons.
Irritation additionally triggers coagulation, creating clots that may block blood circulate to cells and kill them. And it prompts the microglia, which can try and take away extra neurons than they usually would.
Boldrini’s work will assist scientists disentangle the components driving that injury.
“She’s an professional at that,” says Dr. James Goldman, a neuropathologist at Columbia College. “We’re wanting ahead to seeing what she comes up with.”
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In a close-by room, analysis assistant Cheick Sissoko checks to see whether or not the DNA fragments obtained from the tissue are too huge or too small for correct evaluation. In the event that they’re the correct dimension, Sissoko will use them to higher perceive the gene expression in these mind cells — significantly within the younger neurons that appear to be taking successful in COVID-19 sufferers.
“Ideally, we will take a look at each single gene expressed by a single cell,” he says.
Boldrini and analysis assistant Cheick Sissoko confer on the progress of their work.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Instances)
On different days, Sissoko focuses on RNA, the molecule that helps flip DNA’s directions into precise proteins. The RNA contained in mind tissue could present clues in regards to the alarms that had been set off within the physique in response to the coronavirus, and the way the physique reacted to a perceived menace.
Sissoko makes use of a classy new approach to sequence the RNA on a slide-by-slide foundation. That enables him to see how RNA expression modifications in numerous components of the mind.
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In the end, the researchers intention to mix the information on RNA, the microglia, the brand new and mature neurons, and the connections they make to create a portrait of a mind ravaged by COVID-19.
By evaluating the brains of COVID-19 sufferers with and with out neurological signs, Boldrini hopes to make clear the function of irritation in a large swath of neurodegenerative ailments, together with melancholy and dementia.
“This pandemic is nearly like a pure experiment the place you have got numerous irritation like in a really uncommon approach,” she says. “We hope that that is going to make clear some mechanisms of mind injury independently of COVID itself.”
That, in flip, could assist individuals perceive that psychological well being is a vital a part of bodily well being.
“I believe this could possibly be very helpful to struggle the stigma towards psychiatric sickness,” Boldrini says. “The mind is an organ, like another one.”
Dr. Christian Hicks Puig, a psychiatrist at Columbia Medical Middle who works on the lengthy COVID clinic, agreed. Many psychological well being points are rooted in organic processes. “It’s all extraordinarily interconnected,” he says.
As researchers similar to Boldrini map COVID-19’s assault on the mind, they could assist docs extra deeply perceive the relationships amongst psychological well being, cognitive well being and illness. They could additionally acquire perception into the long-term wants of COVID-19 survivors.
That progress wouldn’t be potential with out the contributions of those that didn’t make it, Goldman says.
“We’re very, very grateful to households who’ve allowed us to do these autopsies,” he says.
Boldrini agrees, including that she and others really feel immense strain to deal with these organs with care.
“These are individuals,” she says. What they reveal about COVID-19 is essential. What they characterize is irreplaceable.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week set maximum levels for lead in baby foods such as jarred fruits and vegetables, yogurts and dry cereal, part of an effort to cut young kids’ exposure to the toxic metal that causes developmental and neurological problems.
The agency issued final guidance that it estimated could reduce lead exposure from processed baby foods by about 20% to 30%. The limits are voluntary, not mandatory, for food manufacturers, but they allow the FDA to take enforcement action if foods exceed the levels.
It’s part of the FDA’s ongoing effort to “reduce dietary exposure to contaminants, including lead, in foods to as low as possible over time, while maintaining access to nutritious foods,” the agency said in a statement.
Consumer advocates, who have long sought limits on lead in children’s foods, welcomed the guidance first proposed two years ago, but said it didn’t go far enough.
“FDA’s actions today are a step forward and will help protect children,” said Thomas Galligan, a scientist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “However, the agency took too long to act and ignored important public input that could have strengthened these standards.”
The new limits on lead for children younger than 2 don’t cover grain-based snacks such as puffs and teething biscuits, which some research has shown contain higher levels of lead. And they don’t limit other metals such as cadmium that have been detected in baby foods.
The FDA’s announcement comes just one week after a new California law took effect that requires baby food makers selling products in California to provide a QR code on their packaging to take consumers to monthly test results for the presence in their product of four heavy metals: lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium.
The change, required under a law passed by the California Legislature in 2023, will affect consumers nationwide. Because companies are unlikely to create separate packaging for the California market, QR codes are likely to appear on products sold across the country, and consumers everywhere will be able to view the heavy metal concentrations.
Although companies are required to start printing new packaging and publishing test results of products manufactured beginning in January, it may take time for the products to hit grocery shelves.
The law was inspired by a 2021 congressional investigation that found dangerously high levels of heavy metals in packaged foods marketed for babies and toddlers. Baby foods and their ingredients had up to 91 times the arsenic level, up to 177 times the lead level, up to 69 times the cadmium level, and up to five times the mercury level that the U.S. allows to be present in bottled or drinking water, the investigation found.
There’s no safe level of lead exposure for children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The metal causes “well-documented health effects,” including brain and nervous system damage and slowed growth and development. However, lead occurs naturally in some foods and comes from pollutants in air, water and soil, which can make it impossible to eliminate entirely.
The FDA guidance sets a lead limit of 10 parts per billion for fruits, most vegetables, grain and meat mixtures, yogurts, custards and puddings and single-ingredient meats. It sets a limit of 20 parts per billion for single-ingredient root vegetables and for dry infant cereals. The guidance covers packaged processed foods sold in jars, pouches, tubs or boxes.
Jaclyn Bowen, executive director of the Clean Label Project, an organization that certifies baby foods as having low levels of toxic substances, said consumers can use the new FDA guidance in tandem with the new California law: The FDA, she said, has provided parents a “hard and fast number” to consider a benchmark when looking at the new monthly test results.
But Brian Ronholm, director of food policy for Consumer Reports, called the FDA limits “virtually meaningless because they’re based more on industry feasibility and not on what would best protect public health.” A product with a lead level of 10 parts per billion is “still too high for baby food. What we’ve heard from a lot of these manufacturers is they are testing well below that number.”
The new FDA guidance comes more than a year after lead-tainted pouches of apple cinnamon puree sickened more than 560 children in the U.S. between October 2023 and April 2024, according to the CDC.
The levels of lead detected in those products were more than 2,000 times higher than the FDA’s maximum. Officials stressed that the agency doesn’t need guidance to take action on foods that violate the law.
Aleccia writes for the Associated Press. Gold reports for The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
Anyone hoping for a clear path forward this year for NASA’s imperiled Mars Sample Return mission will have to wait a little longer.
The agency has settled on two potential strategies for the first effort to bring rock and soil from another planet back to Earth for study, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday: It can either leverage existing technology into a simpler, cheaper craft or turn to a commercial partner for a new design.
But the final decision on the mission’s structure — or whether it should proceed at all — “is going to be a function of the new administration,” Nelson said. President-elect Donald Trump will take office Jan. 20.
“I don’t think we want the only [Mars] sample return coming back on a Chinese spacecraft,” Nelson said, referencing a rival mission that Beijing has in the works. “I think that the [Trump] administration will certainly conclude that they want to proceed. So what we wanted to do was to give them the best possible options so that they can go from there.”
The call also contained words of encouragement for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, which leads the embattled mission’s engineering efforts.
“To put it really bluntly, JPL is our Mars center in NASA science,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate. “They are the people who landed us on Mars, together with our industry partners. So they will be moving forward, regardless of which path, with a key role in the Mars Sample Return.”
In April, after an independent review found “near zero probability” of Mars Sample Return making its proposed 2028 launch date, NASA put out a request for alternative proposals to all of its centers and the private sector. JPL was forced to compete for what had been its own project.
The independent review board determined that the original design would probably cost up to $11 billion and not return samples to Earth until at least 2040.
“That was just simply unacceptable,” said Nelson, who paused the mission in late 2023 to review its chances of success.
Ensuing cuts to the mission’s budget forced a series of layoffs at JPL, which let go of 855 employees and 100 on-site contractors in 2024.
The NASA-led option that Nelson suggested Tuesday includes several elements from the JPL proposal, according to a person who reviewed the documents. This leaner, simpler alternative will cost between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion, and will return the samples by 2039, he said. A commercial alternative would probably cost $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion.
Nelson, a former Democratic U.S. senator from Florida, will step down as head of the space agency when Trump takes office. Trump has nominated as his successor Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire who performed the first private space walk, who must be confirmed by the Senate.
NASA has not had any conversations with Trump’s transition team about Mars Sample Return, Nelson said. How the new administration will prioritize the project is not yet clear.
“It’s very uncertain how the new administration will go forward,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, a Pasadena nonprofit that promotes space research. “Cancellation is obviously still on the table. … It’s hard to game this out.”
Planetary scientists have identified Mars Sample Return as their field’s highest priority in the last three decadal surveys, reports that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine prepare every 10 years in order to advise NASA.
Successfully completing the mission is “key for the nation’s leadership in space science,” said Bethany L. Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at Caltech in Pasadena. “I hope the incoming administrator moves forward decisively to select a plan and execute. There are extraordinary engineers at JPL and NASA industry partners eager and able to get to work to make it happen.”
Night fell as the two scientists got to work, unfurling long nets off the end of their boat. The jungle struck up its evening symphony: the sweet chittering of insects, the distant bellowing of monkeys, the occasional screech of a kite. Crocodiles lounged in the shallows, their eyes glinting when headlamps were shined their way.
Across the water, cargo ships made dark shapes as they slid between the seas.
The Panama Canal has for more than a century connected far-flung peoples and economies, making it an essential artery for global trade — and, in recent weeks, a target of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s expansionist designs.
But of late the canal has been linking something else, too: the immense ecosystems of the Atlantic and the Pacific.
The two oceans have been separated for some three million years, ever since the isthmus of Panama rose out of the water and split them. The canal cut a path through the continent, yet for decades only a handful of marine fish species managed to migrate through the waterway and the freshwater reservoir, Lake Gatún, that feeds its locks.
Then, in 2016, Panama expanded the canal to allow supersize ships, and all that started to change.
In less than a decade, fish from both oceans — snooks, jacks, snappers and more — have almost entirely displaced the freshwater species that were in the canal system before, scientists with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have found. Fishermen around Lake Gatún who rely on those species, chiefly peacock bass and tilapia, say their catches are growing scarce.
Researchers now worry that more fish could start making their way through from one ocean to the other. And no potential invader causes more concern than the venomous, candy-striped lionfish. They are known to inhabit Panama’s Caribbean coast, but not the eastern Pacific. If they made it there through the canal, they could ravage the defenseless local fish, just as they’ve done in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
Already, marine species are more than occasional visitors in Lake Gatún, said Phillip Sanchez, a fisheries ecologist with the Smithsonian. They’re “becoming the dominant community,” he said. They’re “pushing everything else out.”
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