Persistent Cerebral 18-FDG PET Changes in Patients With Long COVID Presenting With Fatigue and Post Exertional Malaise
🚨We already knew Long COVID brain damage could last 6 months.
Now this new PET scan study proves it’s still there at 2 YEARS and counting.
Hypometabolism hits the left sensorimotor cortex (movement body sense), left superior parietal (spatial awareness attention), and bilateral visual cortex (raw sight processing).
This is NOT just “tired.”
This is a broken sensory-motor command center.
Is this the start of a lifelong neurological disease?
➡️Mayo Clinic observational cohort study of 40 Long COVID patients (70% female, median age 53) from a specialized clinic who underwent brain 18F-FDG PET-CT scans 17–149 weeks (median 62 weeks) after SarsCoV2 infection,
➡️73% had predominant fatigue with post-exertional malaise (PEM),
➡️This group showed statistically significant cerebral hypometabolism vs. non-PEM patients in the left sensorimotor cortex (p=0.0253), left superior parietal cortex (p=0.0276), and bilateral primary visual cortex (p=0.0096 and 0.0016),
➡️Abnormalities persisted already up to ~2 years post-infection,
➡️Scans used pons-normalized Z-scores against age/gender-matched controls with common comorbidities included psychiatric, GI, and cardiovascular conditions,
➡️Caveat: No references to vaccination status and/or reinfections,
➡️Authors propose 18F-FDG PET-CT as a potential diagnostic and therapeutic biomarker for the fatigue/PEM phenotype of Long COVID.
‼️So, AGAIN, Long COVID fatigue and PEM have a demonstrable, persistent neurological signature! Cerebral hypometabolism, still detectable on PET scans up to two years later and hits the left sensorimotor cortex (movement body sense), left superior parietal cortex (spatial awareness attention), and bilateral primary visual cortex (raw sight processing).
This isn’t just “tired.”
It’s a broken sensory-motor command center.
😡Study proves LC is biologically real, not psychosomatic or any other stupid FND diagnosis.
Without urgent validation of this biomarker and targeted therapies, patients will continue to be dismissed despite objective brain damage!
#AvoidSars2 #AvoidReinfections #BrainDamage
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…