Characterization and Modulation of Brain Networks to Promote Brain Resilience for the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

As of the end of 2020, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had resulted in over 88 million confirmed cases and nearly 2 million deaths worldwide. Recurring waves of infection are forcing to impose continuing social restrictions and confinement measures all around the world.

From a public health perspective, these measures could potentially have an important negative impact on society and has led to the call for development of preventive and interventional strategies.

However despite the generalized negative effects of infection some individuals seem relatively protected from negative sequelae. Therefore, some people appear to be particularly resilient and the characterization and better understanding of characteristics that explain why some remain resilient has been highlighted as a critical focus of needed research, as it allows the potential to identify factors that can be targets for designing interventional strategies.

Resilience, the concept that describes the capacity of certain individuals to resist the impact of illness and distress, is a broad term. In clinical psychology and mental health, the concept of resilience has been historically been linked to the study of individual differences (e.g., self-esteem, sense of control, perception of social support, etc.) that determine the capacity to cope with the impact of life traumas in order to maintain normal psychological and physical functioning and avoid serious mental illness.

Beyond the psychological aspects, the determinants and factors that confer individual differences in resilience require integrated assessment of specific person's social context, engagement in positive lifestyles, and their interplay with its brain biological substrates and mechanisms. Neuroimaging investigations have identified brain regions that show specific activity and connectivity patterns during exposure to stressful or violent stimuli and that may be correlated with scores in psychosocial scales of resilience or predict subsequent coping abilities. Within the field of ageing and dementia some studies have suggested the role of the frontal cortex, specifically the functional connectivity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the rest of the brain or to particular networks (DMN, SN), as a neural substrate of higher resilience, both in normal aging.