This week in At UM science Raphaël Gaudin and Jules Bouget from the Montpellier Infectious Disease Research Institute tell us about cognitive virology. Our report takes us to the dendrochronology tray from the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences of Montpellier in the company of Benoit Brossier, finally the guest of the last minutes Nathan Roure will present the festival to us South of Sciences. A show broadcast every Wednesday on the radio Divergence.
On November 28, the newspaper The World published an article written by a collective organized around Solenn Tanguy, the president of Winslow Public Health and entitled “The symptoms of long Covid only make sense when they are linked to their cause”. This column followed another also published in The World on November 4 under the title “Alongside the science of diseases, we plead the science of symptoms”. A text developed by researchers and clinicians pleading for a psychosomatic vision of this same long Covid.
Proof that six years after its appearance, long Covid retains the status of a contested disease in France.
However, numerous studies document and confirm the persistence of prolonged cognitive impairment following Covid. One of these studies published last September in Nature Medicine compared 351 people hospitalized for Covid and aged on average 54 years old to 2927 people similar in terms of age, sex and level of education. The result is chilling: “ it is as if the brains of these patients had undergone an acceleration of the aging process by 20 years » declares one of the authors.
And Covid is not the only virus to cause cognitive damage: West Nile virus, chikungunya, rabies… all these agents have become experts in the art of infiltrating our brains and they do not always do so without leaving traces, as Raphaël Gaudin and Jules Bouget, researchers at the Montpellier Infectious Disease Research Institute (IRIM), authors of an article entitled When viral infections modify neuronal circuits: towards cognitive virology published in the journal Sciences direct November 7, 2025.
In the second part of the program we start a series of reports at the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences in Montpellier. For the first, it is Benoit Brossier who shows us the dendrochronology platform where he studies the growth rings of trees.
Finally, Nathan Roure, in charge of press relations at the University of Montpellier, presents the Sud de sciences festival which began on December 2 and which will continue until the 7th for its 8the editions.
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