Many people who have overcome COVID-19 have stated that one of the effects that the disease has had on them is memory degradation and problems with attention and concentration, which is known as brain fog. Now, a study carried out by researchers from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and the Department of Clinical Neurosciences in Nuffield (England) has found that these cognitive consequences could be maintained between six and nine months after the disease has passed.
The most striking thing about the research, which has been published in the journal Brain Communications, is that these negative cognitive effects of persistent COVID could occur even when the disease has been mild. The participants, 155 adults with an average age of 28 who had passed the coronavirus, had to complete a series of exercises to measure their memory and cognitive ability, specifically to find out how their attention, planning and semantic reasoning were.
The results indicated that the participants had good scores in most of the skills analyzed, including working memory and planning, but showed significantly worse episodic memory up to six months after SARS-CoV-2 virus infection, and a greater reduction in the ability to maintain attention during the following nine months, compared to uninfected people.
Mental fog effects wear off over time
“What is surprising is that although our COVID-19 survivors did not feel more symptomatic at the time of testing, they did show degraded attention and memory. Our findings reveal that people can experience some chronic cognitive consequences for months,” explains Dr. Sijia Zhao, one of the study’s authors.
People who get COVID-19 may have worse episodic memory for up to six months and shorter attention span for nine months
They have also indicated that, although the mechanisms that cause these cognitive deficits in people with COVID-19 are not yet known, they have found it encouraging to see how this attention and memory largely return to normal in the majority of people in the study. between six and nine months after the disease, so there should be no need to worry because everything returns to normal after that period.
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