“These neurons are like Siamese twins, they are joined at the hip,” says Adonis Sfera, a psychiatrist associated with Patton State Hospital and Loma Linda University who was not involved with the study. “Can they function as neurons? Nobody knows that yet. But chances are they have lost some of that function.”
It remains to be seen whether these findings will hold up in the brains of animals infected with SARS-CoV-2, however, much less humans, says Olivier Schwartz, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute. He and others say no one has really looked for neuronal syncytia in COVID-19 patients who died. Still, he says, the work makes sense and is worth exploring further. He also says
neuronal fusion may be more relevant to other viruses that infect more neurons than SARS-CoV-2 typically does,
such as the rabies virus. The findings might even provide another reason rabies wreaks havoc on the brain, Schwartz says.
Could fused neurons explain COVID-19’s ‘brain fog’? (Science, June 7, 2023)
