IRIS

Personalized and Translational Neuroscience Lab (PanLab)

Founding lab of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness

The IRIS neuroStudy aims to assess the long-term neuropsychiatric and neuropsychological dysfunction associated with COVID-19 from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Infection Recovery in SARS-CoV-2 Infection neuroStudy (IRIS)

Overview

The Infection Recovery in SARS-CoV-2 Infection neuroStudy (IRIS) examines the longitudinal impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection on physical function, mental health, chronic fatigue, health related quality of life and neuropsychological function over the 12 months post infection.

The proposed human subjects study leverages interdisciplinary expertise across the medical school to address the urgent need to understand the mechanisms by which the SARS-CoV-2 infection may impact long term neuropsychiatric and neuropsychological function. There are increasing reports of post-infection ‘brain fog’ characterized by poor concentration, anxiety and sleep disruptions, even when physical COVID symptoms were mild. Our IRIS study represents a landmark study in addressing these possibilities in depth. The knowledge generated will have the potential help elucidate the root cause of ‘brain fog’ post-infection, yield new brain-based tools for diagnosing COVID-19-related neuropsychiatric sequelae and identify selective mechanistic targets for novel interventions that will ultimately help ameliorate these effects.

Our Goals

Our goal is to develop, using neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and immunological assays, biobehavioral signatures to assist with the prediction and diagnosis of COVID-19 psychiatric outcomes as well as the tailoring of treatment. To the best of our knowledge, this would be the first systematic study of the long-term neurologic and neuropsychiatric impact of COVID-19. Our brain imaging biotypes represent an innovation that we leverage in the new study of the impact of COVID-19. These biotypes have been shown to provide biomarkers for assessing the impact of pharmacotherapeutic interventions in neuropsychiatric disorders, and the impact on mechanistic targets engaged by these interventions. Thus, in coordination with the PIs from the IRIS cohort providing immunological and physical diagnostic data, our previous findings will provide the foundation for exploring important tools to assess behavioral and neurologic dysfunction related to COVID-19 and, in future studies, target this dysfunction with selective treatments.

We seek to address the following four specific aims:

Aim 1: Characterize the severity and progression of psychiatric symptoms in patients from the IRIS cohort at 3, 6 and 12 months post-COVID19 diagnosis compared to healthy reference norms.

Aim 2: Characterize the severity and progression of impairments in neurocognitive functions, focusing on those that are characteristic of ‘brain fog’ relative to those that are not.

Aim 3: Identify profiles of neural circuit dysfunction (“biotypes”) that underly the neurocognitive and neuropsychological impairments falling within the classification of “brain fog.”

Aim 4: Elucidate the extent to which the symptom-neuropsychological-biotype profiles elucidated under Aims 1, 2 and 3 are associated with immunophenotyping profiles generated by our ID collaborators.