UK teams identify brain changes and genetic risk factors in COVID-19 patients; plus AbbVie, BAKX and more
BioCentury’s roundup of translational news
Teams from University of Oxford and Genomics England Ltd. used information from COVID-19 patient databases to identify brain abnormalities and host genetic risk factors for severe disease, respectively, and published the findings in Nature.
The Oxford group used data from the UK Biobank to study 401 brain images from people imaged twice who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection between their two scans, and compared them with 384 controls. The infected people showed a reduction in global brain size and larger cognitive decline between the two time points, even after excluding hospitalized participants...