Chronic sinus inflammation appears to alter brain activity

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/uows-csi040721.php

 

News Release 8-Apr-2021
Study findings may help explain patients' complaints of poor concentration and other cognitive symptoms that accompany sinusitis
University of Washington School of Medicine/UW Medicine

 

The millions of people who have chronic sinusitis deal not only with stuffy noses and headaches, they also commonly struggle to focus, and experience depression and other symptoms that implicate the brain's involvement in their illness.

New research links sinus inflammation with alterations in brain activity, specifically with the neural networks that modulate cognition, introspection and response to external stimuli.


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"We know from previous studies that patients who have sinusitis often decide to seek medical care not because they have a runny nose and sinus pressure, but because the disease is affecting how they interact with the world: They can't be productive, thinking is difficult, sleep is lousy. It broadly impacts their quality of life. Now we have a prospective mechanism for what we observe clinically."

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