Human Coronaviruses and Other Respiratory Viruses: Underestimated Opportunistic Pathogens of the Central Nervous System?

By M. Desforges, Alain Le Coupanec, Philippe Dubeau, A. Bourgouin, L. Lajoie, M. Dubé, P. Talbot. Viruses, 2019

956 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Respiratory viruses infect the human upper respiratory tract, mostly causing mild diseases. However, in vulnerable populations, such as newborns, infants, the elderly and immune-compromised individuals, these opportunistic pathogens can also affect the lower respiratory tract, causing a more severe disease (e.g., pneumonia). Respiratory viruses can also exacerbate asthma and lead to various types of respiratory distress syndromes. Furthermore, as they can adapt fast and cross the species barrier, some of these pathogens, like influenza A and SARS-CoV, have occasionally caused epidemics or pandemics, and were associated with more serious clinical diseases and even mortality. For a few decades now, data reported in the scientific literature has also demonstrated that several respiratory viruses have neuroinvasive capacities, since they can spread from the respiratory tract to the central nervous system (CNS). Viruses infecting human CNS cells could then cause different types of encephalopathy, including encephalitis, and long-term neurological diseases. Like other well-recognized neuroinvasive human viruses, respiratory viruses may damage the CNS as a result of misdirected host immune responses that could be associated with autoimmunity in susceptible individuals (virus-induced neuro-immunopathology) and/or viral replication, which directly causes damage to CNS cells (virus-induced neuropathology). The etiological agent of several neurological disorders remains unidentified. Opportunistic human respiratory pathogens could be associated with the triggering or the exacerbation of these disorders whose etiology remains poorly understood. Herein, we present a global portrait of some of the most prevalent or emerging human respiratory viruses that have been associated with possible pathogenic processes in CNS infection, with a special emphasis on human coronaviruses.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a544173d7346c054a65f19eb0bad8b81d4b9aeb

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In Epidemiology

1. R. O’Connor
2. R. Silver

In Infectious Diseases

1. A. Asadi-Pooya
2. Leila Simani

Citations in the corpus

• Central nervous system involvement by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus‐2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) (2020, background): “Our observation of viral particles in endothelial cells may have implications for the route of entry of SARS-CoV-2 into the CNS.”
• Central nervous system manifestations of COVID-19: A systematic review (2020, background): “Coronavirus infections have been associated with neurological manifestations (e.g., febrile seizures, convulsions, change in mental status, and encephalitis) [2, 3] .”
• Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic: a call for action for mental health science (2020, background): “101 The neuronal pathway, used by other corona-viruses, 102,103 is to invade a specialist sensory receptor in peripheral tissue, travel by the axonal transport systems to the brainstem, and propagate between neurons by trans-synaptic mechanisms.”
• Are we facing a crashing wave of neuropsychiatric sequelae of COVID-19? Neuropsychiatric symptoms and potential immunologic mechanisms (2020, neutral): “In animal models of MS, auto-reactive lymphocytes have been identified which cross-react with both CoV epitopes and human myelin (Desforges et al., 2019) , suggesting that molecular mimicry might be a potential mechanism by which CoV infection could potentiate development of autoimmune neuropsychiat”