news, for those who have what's known as long COVID, the symptoms can linger for years.

And according to new research from the University of Kentucky, long COVID can cause lasting damage, including cognitive impairment similar to Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

We spoke to the researchers behind that study.

Long COVID is after COVID have test negative and people still experience symptoms of neurological deficits and cognitive problems such as mental fog fatigue and could not focus attention problem and later memory problems very similar to Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

Were all part of a larger project cure at the University of Kentucky that studies the role of certain brain cells in Alzheimer's disease and related work related dementias.

And so when one cell type is called astrocytes, and so astrocytes with Mike Quigley play a role in neuroinflammation.

So when the brain kind of becomes inflamed, you see a lot of the same kinds of symptoms that you see with long, long COVID.

So you get a brain fog, for instance, you have cognitive deficits, and a lot of these are really severe, which you see it, early stages of dementia as well.

There's genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease, and there's also environmental risk factors for Alzheimer's disease, things like repetitive brain injury, for instance.

So with something like long COVID, that also seems like it might be a kind of brain insult.

And so one of the things I think will be important for us to try to understand, you know, as we get farther and farther removed from the pandemic, is does infectivity with COVID increase risk of later life dementia and Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases like that?

We really want to promote the idea that when somebody has COVID or worried about long COVID, they will not just check their long, they will check their heart function and a brain function and methods like EEG or other methods that are available at hospitals and and hopefully in the future will be more routinely used long COVID and or COVID.

Each is relatively simple compared to like going in and getting an MRI or going in and getting a PET scan or even worse, getting a spinal tap and having your your cerebrospinal fluid assayed.

You know, so EEG, you're you just attach electrodes to to your head.

And most hospitals are set up to do that.

That kind of testing, if there's a cell type that you know is affected by by COVID, you know, like astrocytes or some other cell type in the brain that gives you the potential for a drug target.

So if something works for ameliorating brain fog with COVID, for instance, we might be able to work and see if that also ameliorates cognitive changes that early stages of Alzheimer's disease and vice versa.

According to the latest numbers from the CDC, about 17 million Americans currently have long COVID.