Research: COVID-19 could cause long-term memory impairment

• A recent study looked into the prevalence of post-COVID-19 cognitive impairment and its association with the disease severity.
• Memory encoding and memory recall were the most prominent cognitive deficits, found in over 20% of the study participants.
• Researchers noted that hospitalized patients were more likely to exhibit cognitive impairments compared to those treated in the outpatient setting.

A recent study revealed that COVID-19 could cause long-term side effects concerning one’s memory, such as “brain fog” and memory loss.

Experts from Mt. Sinai Health System studied 740 participants who had an average age of 49. Around 63% were women and the majority were white. Some received a COVID-19 vaccine while some contracted the virus. The average time from COVID-19 diagnosis was about eight months.

None of the patients had a history of dementia.

The researchers measured the prevalence of post-COVID-19 cognitive impairment as well as its association with the disease severity.

They looked into patient data from April 2020 through May 2021 while other patients reported their own demographic characteristics.

They used “well-validated neuropsychological measures” to test participants’ cognitive function. This included a language test, counting forward and backward, and the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test, which tested how many words a patient could recall.

The team analyzed the frequency of impairment on each measure. They then used logistic regression to assess the relationship between cognitive impairment and the COVID-19 care site. They adjusted these to account for comorbidities, depression, body mass index, race and ethnicity, and smoking.

Memory recall and memory encoding were shown to be the most prominent cognitive deficits, showing up in 23% and 24% of the participants, respectively.

Compared to outpatients, hospitalized patients were more likely to have impairments in memory encoding, memory recall, executive functioning, attention, and category fluency. Emergency cases were also more likely to have impairments in memory encoding and category fluency than outpatients.

The researchers noted an executive pattern “consistent with early reports describing a dysexecutive syndrome after COVID-19, and has considerable implications for occupational, psychological, and functional outcomes.”

The team acknowledged that older adults and certain populations are known to be more susceptible to cognitive impairment after critical illness. Still, they found that a substantial proportion of the relatively younger study participants also exhibited post-COVID-19 cognitive dysfunction.

Further studies are still needed, however, to further identify risk factors, mechanisms underlying cognitive dysfunction, and options for rehabilitation.

The study was published last week in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Source: Fox News