Sunday, May 15, 2022

Brain Fog after COVID

In the last few days, I have talked to a number of people who have had COVID or knew people who had COVID. One of the symptoms they talked about was what they described as "Brain Fog." When I asked what that was, they said, they felt confused and unable to think clearly enough to make decisions both minor and major ones. One person I talked to said it took them about 7 months before they felt they were back to normal.

"Brain Fog" is a real thing according to a new study, reported by Sky News

 Here are some quotes from the story.

Patients who overcome severe COVID infections suffer a cognitive impairment which is the equivalent of losing 10 IQ points say the team of scientists from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

Their findings suggest that the effects of the coronavirus infection are still detectable more than six months after the illness, that cognitive recovery is gradual at best, and that it may even impact people who only had mild cases.

What are the signs of impairment?

The survivors scored particularly poorly on verbal analogical reasoning tasks, a result the researchers say supports the commonly-reported problem of difficulty finding words.

"They also showed slower processing speeds, which aligns with previous observations post COVID-19 of decreased brain glucose consumption within the frontoparietal network of the brain, responsible for attention, complex problem-solving and working memory, among other functions."

Professor David Menon from the University of Cambridge, the study's senior author, said: "Cognitive impairment is common to a wide range of neurological disorders, including dementia, and even routine ageing, but the patterns we saw – the cognitive 'fingerprint' of COVID-19 – was distinct from all of these."

Prof Menon added: "We followed some patients up as late as ten months after their acute infection, so we're able to see a very slow improvement.

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