Does COVID19 Infect the Brain? If So, Smokers Might Be at a Higher Risk

Abstract

COVID19 is a devastating global pandemic with epicenters in China, Italy, Spain, and now the United States. While the majority of infected cases appear mild, in some cases, individuals present serious cardiorespiratory complications with possible long-term Fig. 2. Mechanisms of ACE2 entry and COVID19 infection in neural cells. (A) A role for nicotine-associated upregulation of nAChRs in ACE2 expressing astrocytes and neurons. Based on published findings, upregulation of nAChRs can also increase ACE2 cell surface expression, thereby enhancing viral entry and infection. (B) A putative clinical timeline for progression of COVID19 into the brain. Coronavirus in the Brain and the Impact of Smoking

The spatial and cell-type distribution of SARS-CoV-2 receptor ACE2 in human and mouse brain

“…Here we mainly found: (1) The expression of ACE2 was relatively high in several specific brain areas in human, such as such as the substantia nigra and brain ventricles; (2) the expression of ACE2 located in many neurons (both excitatory and inhibitory neurons) and some non-neuron cells (mainly astrocytes and ODCs) in human middle temporal gyrus and posterior cingulate cortex, but the ACE2-expressing cells was none in PFC and very few in hippocampus; (3) Except for the additional expression of ACE2 in the olfactory bulb areas for spatial distribution and the pericytes and endothelial cells for cell-type distribution analysis, the main distribution figure of ACE2 in mouse brain was similar to that in human. Thus, our results reveal an outline of ACE2 distribution in the human and mouse brain, which support the hypotheses that the SARS-CoV-2 is capable to infect the brain and may result in serious CNS symptoms in COVID-19 patients (Kabbani and Olds, 2020).…”

CovidNLP: A Web Application for Distilling Systemic Implications of COVID-19 Pandemic with Natural Language Processing

“…To understand the risk from the literature we filter the article using the keyword risk and we found 137 titles talking about the risk we summarise the abstract of all filtered articles into 15 sentences . followings are meaningful points with the summary • Health promotion strategies for students.,COVID-19 is a devastating global pandemic with epicenters in China, Italy, Spain, and now the United States [21]. • Published findings indicate that SARS-CoV can enter the human nervous system with evidence from both postmortem brains and detection in cerebrospinal fluid of infected individuals [21].…”

“…followings are meaningful points with the summary • Health promotion strategies for students.,COVID-19 is a devastating global pandemic with epicenters in China, Italy, Spain, and now the United States [21]. • Published findings indicate that SARS-CoV can enter the human nervous system with evidence from both postmortem brains and detection in cerebrospinal fluid of infected individuals [21]. • Endoscopists face risk for infection with viruses like SARS-CoV-2, as the aerosol generating nature of endoscopy diffuses respiratory disease that can be spread via an airborne and droplet route [22].…”

Review of: "Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic COVID-19"

“…"smoking protection is likely to be mediated by nicotine" and "reference 17". Recent studies report that smoking is associated with increased ACE2 expression (4-7) and it is hypothesized that nicotine exposure can increase risk for COVID-19 not only in the lung but also in the brain (8).…”