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A new study on the long-term cognitive effects of severe COVID-19 comes with worrying results.
Felt during the corona pandemic disappears from public perceptionscientists continue to conduct feverish research on the coronavirus — especially on the long-term consequences of an illness.
A new study led by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge now examined the cognitive effects of severe Covid courses. and has disturbing results.
These suggest that the effects are detectable more than six months following the acute illness and that recovery is gradual at best.
Patients admitted to the hospital with Covid may therefore have thinking difficulties comparable to aging by 20 years.
According to the authors, the work is the most thorough study to date on the long-term cognitive effects of severe Covid-19 courses.
Slower processing speed
The study, published in eClinicalMedicine, examined 46 patients who were admitted to the hospital with a severe course of Covid-19. Sixteen of these patients required mechanical ventilation during their hospital stay.
Around six months following their acute illness, the patients completed a series of complex cognitive tests. Each subject was compared to ten demographically matched healthy controls.
The results therefore suggest that those who were hospitalized with Covid had particular cognitive impairments.
“The thing they struggle with the most is verbal understanding,” explains Menon. This also includes completing analogies, such as shoelaces are to shoes what buttons are to a coat.
Survivors performed particularly poorly on items such as verbal analogy understanding. They also showed a slower processing speed.
Loss of ten IQ points
The researchers calculated that the extent of the cognitive deficits corresponds on average to regarding 20 years of aging. A 50-year-old who was hospitalized with severe Covid disease showed similar cognitive test results as a 70-year-old, which corresponds to a loss of ten IQ points, according to the study.
“Cognitive impairment is seen in a variety of neurological disorders, including dementia, and even in normal aging, but the patterns we’ve seen — the cognitive ‘fingerprint’ of COVID-19 — are different from all of these,” he said Lead author David Menon.
In general, the long-term consequences would be related to the severity of the disease. So Covid causes “problems with a variety of organs in the body, including the brain, our cognitive function and our mental health,” explains Menon.
According to Adam Hampshire from Imperial College London, around 40,000 people with Covid-19 have been treated in intensive care in England alone. Many others were therefore very ill, but were not admitted to the hospital. This means that there are a large number of people who still have problems with perception many months later.
“We urgently need to look at what can be done to help these people.”
