The Side Effects of Covid-19 Includes Memory Loss Brain Fog and More

According to studies, memory loss and “brain fog” may be long-term negative effects of COVID-19. Mt. Sinai Health System specialists reviewed data from 740 participants, some of whom had infected the virus and others who had simply received the COVID-19 vaccination, in a study published last week in the journal JAMA Network Open. The patients, who had no prior history of dementia, were on average 49 years old and 63 percent of them were female. COVID-19 diagnosis took an average of nearly eight months, and the majority of patients studied were White. The researchers looked at patient data from April 2020 to May 2021 to see how common post-COVID-19 cognitive impairment is and how it relates to the severity of the condition.

Patients who were treated in outpatient clinics, emergency rooms, or inpatient hospitals provided their own demographic information. “Well-validated neuropsychological measures,” such as counting forward and backward, a language exam, and the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test, which gave the patients a series of words in different categories and measured how many they could recall, were used to assess cognitive performance. The researchers next used logistic regression to analyse the connection between cognitive impairment and COVID-19 care site, adjusted for race and ethnicity, smoking, BMI, comorbidities, and depression.

Overall, they discovered that the most common cognitive abnormalities were in Memory encoding and Memory recall, which were reported in 24% and 23% of the subjects, respectively. In addition, hospitalised patients were more likely than outpatients to have problems with attention, executive functioning, category fluency, encoding, and Memory recall. In the setting of deficient encoding and recall, the relative sparing of Memory recognition reflects an executive pattern. This trend is consistent with early reports of a COVID-19-induced dysexecutive syndrome, and it has important consequences for occupational, psychological, and functional outcomes.

While it is well known that older adults and certain populations are more susceptible to cognitive impairment after critical illness, the researchers found that a significant proportion of the study’s relatively young cohort also had cognitive dysfunction several months after recovering from COVID-19. Further research is needed to discover risk factors, mechanisms driving cognitive impairment, and treatment alternatives, according to the researchers.