Neurologic Alterations Due to Respiratory Virus Infections

Bohmwald, Karen; Gálvez, Nicolás M. S.; Ríos, Mariana; Kalergis, Alexis M.

CoV is a group of viruses that belong to the Coronaviridae family and the Nidovirales order. Accordingly, there are four genera of CoV within the Coronavirinae subfamily: AlphaCoV (ACoV), BetaCoV (BCoV), DeltaCoV (DCoV) and GammaCoV (GCoV; King et al., 2012 King et al., , 2018 . Their name proceeds from their characteristic crown-shape and is responsible for a wide range of respiratory and enteric diseases in several hosts, such as rodents, cats, pigs and humans (Desforges et al., 2014b) . There are several Human CoV (HCoV) described as pathogenic in humans, among which are included HCoV-OC43, HCoV-229E, Middle East respiratory syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV), all of them with their respective different genotypes (Gaunt et al., 2010; Cabeça et al., 2013; Matoba et al., 2015) . Remarkably, neurotropic and neuro-invasive capabilities have been described in several of their hosts, including humans among them, leading to symptoms such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and encephalomyelitis (Lau et al., 2004; Yeh et al., 2004; Zlateva and Van Ranst, 2004; Talbot and Falsey, 2010) . However, the capacity of CoV to infect CNS in humans is not well characterized, with their detection in these samples performed mainly by detection of viral RNA, exhibiting persistent infection (Arbour et al., 2000; Desforges et al., 2014a) .