A pattern is emerging among COVID-19 patients arriving at hospitals in New York: Beyond fever, cough and shortness of breath, some are deeply disoriented to the point of not knowing where they are or what year it is.

At times this is linked to low oxygen levels in their blood, but in certain patients the confusion appears disproportionate to how their lungs are faring.

Jennifer Frontera, a neurologist at NYU Langone Brooklyn hospital seeing these patients, told AFP the findings were raising concerns about the impact of the coronavirus on the brain and nervous system.

American oncologists are rushing to prioritise the patients at greatest risk, institute new protections, and learn from their collective experiences, Bryn Nelson reports.

A patient in Washington, newly diagnosed with breast cancer, fought to get her lumpectomy surgery rescheduled after it was cancelled indefinitely. 1 A stuffy nose required another patient in Massachusetts with a recurrent brain tumour to undergo multiple layers of screening before he could receive his immunotherapy infusion. 2 A patient with bladder cancer in North Carolina couldn’t get immunotherapy at all because of a lack of surgical masks and gloves. 3 Then he was denied a surgical alternative because he needed a covid-19 test first. Since he hadn’t been admitted to a hospital with serious covid-19 symptoms, he didn’t meet the testing criteria.

Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on cancer care throughout the US as medical centres scramble to cancel or rearrange surgeries or treatments, tackle a continuing shortage of tests and supplies, and devise new safety protocols to protect a highly susceptible patient group.

The lungs are ground zero for COVID-19, but blood clots may play a surprisingly big role in severe illness.

Brain cells, wrote the Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal in the late 19^th century, “may die” and cannot “be regenerated.” Cajal then threw down the gauntlet, asserting that it was the job of the “science of the future to change, if possible, this harsh decree.” Jack Price’s engaging book The Future of Brain Repair details past, present, and future attempts to address Cajal’s formidable challenge. In so doing, it provides a vibrant and compelling guide to the important and rapidly evolving fields of stem cell–based therapies and brain repair, which together, he believes, are poised to deliver unprecedented changes to the management of brain diseases.

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“In corticospinal injuries using a mouse model, adult neurons begin a natural regeneration by revertiprocessng back to an embryonic state and that regeneration is sustained by a surprising gene.”

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When adult brain cells are injured, they revert to an embryonic state, according to new findings published in the April 15, 2020 issue of Nature by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues elsewhere. The scientists report that in their newly adopted immature state, the cells become capable of re-growing new connections that, under the right conditions, can help to restore lost function.

Repairing damage to the brain and spinal cord may be medical science’s most daunting challenge. Until relatively recently, it seemed an impossible task. The new study lays out a “transcriptional roadmap of regeneration in the adult brain.”