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Research: Corona causes the brain to age by ten years
Cognitive tests performed on people who recovered from corona found that their concentration and logic abilities were impaired, especially if they were severely ill and needed respiratory assistance.
The researchers estimated the damage to be equivalent to 10 years of brain aging
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Sunday, 01 November 2020, 00:02
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More and more studies and data are being collected reinforcing the understanding that Covid-19 causes neurological damage, at least in some patients.
Now, a new study quantifies this damage to the brain with the help of a worrying statistic that illustrates the price that the corona virus charges from brain function.
A study conducted in the UK involved 84,000 people who had recovered from verified or suspected cases such as Covid-19, all of whom were asked to answer questionnaires aimed at assessing their thinking skills.
They were tested on their problem-solving ability, spatial memory, concentration and emotion processing efficiency.
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In addition, the researchers collected from the respondents information on whether they were verified or suspected corona patients, how long they had been suffering from symptoms, what was the severity of their illness and whether they also had background illnesses.
The results of these participants were compared to the same test results performed by healthy participants, who served as a control group.
Even verified recoverers whose symptoms were mild suffered from a certain decrease in brain function.
A worker at the Corona Testing Center in Belgium holds a test pen (Photo: Reuters)
Participants who reported being verified patients on covid-19 had the lowest scores on the tests, relative to the control group.
The low cognitive function was particularly pronounced in patients who reported suffering from severe symptoms, but it is also noticeable (to a lesser extent) in patients with mild symptoms.
A mild case of Covid-19 was defined in the study as someone who fell ill but did not have difficulty breathing.
The research team discovered what it defined as a "particularly strong expression of problems" with so-called high cognition - issues related to participants' concentration and logic functions, and especially with verbal logic.
This is what Adam Hampshire, from the Department of Neuroscience at Imperial College London, and one of the authors of this study, said in an interview with Newsweek.
A 50-year-old brain functions like a 60-year-old
The most striking and disturbing finding of this study concerns participants (aged 20-70) who were severely ill in Corona and needed the assistance of the soul machine.
Once recovered, their test scores showed a person's decades of thinking skills at a level older than them.
That is, the thinking functions of a recovering 50-year-old Corona were like a 60-year-old human, the brain of a recovering 20-year-old functioned cognitively like a 30-year-old brain, and so on.
This means that dealing with the serious illness has caused patients' brains to age by ten years.
The severity of the disease and a verified positive outcome for corona were the only two parameters found in the study to affect brain deterioration.
Respiratory patient (illustration: shutterstock)
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According to the Hampshire researcher, processing of the data revealed that the only two factors found to be responsible for the cognitive decline observed in recovering patients were the severity of their disease and a validated positive test for covid-19.
Other variables, such as the presence of background diseases for example, were not found to have an effect on the brain function of the study participants.
"The results are a wake-up call"
The researchers wrote that their data suggest "that there are chronic cognitive implications for covid-19 morbidity."
They further noted that their findings join a string of different studies and a growing body of scientific evidence showing that corona patients suffer from various neurological problems due to complications such as stroke and increased inflammation due to an overreaction of the immune system.
"These results are a wake-up call for the existence of more detailed studies regarding cognitive impairment in corona virus recoverers," the researchers read.
However, at this time the findings of this study were published only on an online platform of preliminary studies that have not yet been peer-reviewed.
In addition, experts exposed to it noted that one of the salient drawbacks of this study is that participants' cognitive functions were not tested before they occurred, so it is difficult to know whether the impairment in their thinking skills was indeed caused by the corona.
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