2023-07-22 00:03:00
How to age 10 years cognitively. This seems to be the impact of living together for several months with Long Covid symptoms such as the now famous ‘brain fog’, cognitive fog. People who persistently experienced this condition showed reduced performance in activities indicative of various mental processes, up to two years after infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A team of researchers from King’s College London has explored this in a new study. The authors examined whether Covid infection affected mental performance in two rounds of online cognitive tests that took place in 2021 and 2022. The results were published in ‘eClinicalMedicine’.
The data was collected for over 3,000 participants in the ‘Covid Symptom Study Biobank’ study, through 12 activities that tested memory, attention, reasoning, processing speed and motor control. The participants whose test scores were most affected by Covid “were those who had experienced virus-related symptoms for 12 weeks or more. In these people, the effect on test accuracy was comparable in size to the effect of increasing age by 10 years,” the experts found.
There was also no significant improvement in these test scores between the two cycles, performed 9 months apart. By the second tranche of testing, the average time since participants’ initial Covid infection was nearly two years. Digging deeper into the analysis, the researchers separated the participants based on whether they felt fully recovered after the infection, or not. People who felt fully recovered, the scientists point out, behaved similarly to those who hadn’t contracted the virus at all. “In contrast, participants who did not feel fully recovered after infection had lower activity accuracy scores on average,” the authors say.
“Our findings suggest that, for people living with long-term symptoms after contracting Covid, the effects on mental processes such as the ability to remember words and shapes are still detectable on average nearly two years after their initial infection,” summarizes lead author Nathan Cheetham, Senior Postdoctoral Data Scientist at King’s College London. could be considered to have long Covid. The study shows the need to monitor people whose brain function is most affected by Covid, to see how their cognitive symptoms continue to develop and to provide support for their recovery”.
“We’ve used sensitive tests to measure speed and accuracy across a range of brain challenges,” adds Claire Steves, Lecturer in Aging and Health at King’s College London. “And the study shows that some people have measurable changes on these tests after Covid has been going on for almost 2 years. The fact remains that two years after first infection, some people don’t feel fully recovered and their lives continue to be affected by the long-term effects of the coronavirus. We need more work to understand why this happens and what can be done to help.”
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