People who have been hospitalized with Covid may have difficulty thinking comparable in scale to 20 years of aging, research shows.
As the pandemic spread around the world, it became clear that the coronavirus could not only cause immediate health problems, but also leave some people with often debilitating symptoms – a condition known as long-term Covid.
According to a study in the UK, about a third of patients who had symptoms after hospitalization feel fully recovered a year later, with little improvement for most patients in areas including physical function and cognitive impairment.
Experts have now revealed that some patients have remained on average with a prolonged cognitive decline.
David Menon, a professor at the University of Cambridge and senior author of the study, said the degree of disability was related to the severity of the disease.
“[Covid] “It causes problems with various organs in the body, including the brain and our cognitive function and our psychological health,” he said. “If you can have the vaccine and all your doses, you will have a milder disease. So all these problems will be less. “
Writing in the journal eClinicalMedicine, Menon and colleagues reported examining the results of cognitive tests performed on 46 patients, an average of six months after being admitted to Adenbrook Hospital in Cambridge between March and July 2020. Of that group, 16 received mechanical ventilation.
The cognitive tests were performed using the Cognitron platform, developed by researchers at Imperial College London, which is the basis of the BBC’s Great Britain’s Intelligence Test.
The team compared the results to those of 460 people who took part in the BBC challenge and who never had Covid. Ten patients were selected for each patient according to characteristics such as age, gender, education and first language.
The results show that those who were hospitalized with Covid had specific cognitive impairments, including slower processing speeds.
“The thing they struggle with the most is verbal reasoning,” Menon said, noting that the final analogies included, such as laces, are for shoes and buttons are for coats.
The study suggests that although cognitive impairment was pronounced, the magnitude of the change was on average equal to the cognitive decline observed in people aged 50 to 70 years.
The team did not find a strong difference in the level of cognitive impairment between those who completed the tests six months after hospitalization and those tested at 10 months, although there were hints of improvement. He will return for additional tests to see if a stronger association has emerged.
Menon added that research into cognitive decline in patients with Covid could not only help them, but also those who have had similar problems after other illnesses.
“The trials we will be able to conduct will allow us to understand the basic mechanisms and create effective treatments to prevent this and perhaps treat it later,” he said.
Add Comment