A new study has revealed that a significant number of people who recover from COVID-19, particularly those who are hospitalized, experience cognitive difficulties for months.
The study, which was published in the medical journal JAMA on Friday, looked at a group of 740 adults who tested positive for COVID-19 between April 2020 and May 2021 and did not have a history of dementia.
"In this study, we found a relatively high frequency of cognitive impairment several months after patients contracted COVID-19," Icahn School of Medicine scientists at Mount Sinai wrote. "Impairments in executive functioning, processing speed, category fluency, memory encoding, and recall were predominant among hospitalized patients."
Nearly a quarter of the study's participants said they had trouble retaining new memories, and nearly the same number said they had trouble recalling memories seven months following diagnosis.
Around 18% of the participants reported problems with processing speed, and more than 15% had impairments with executive functioning, which includes the capacity to make decisions.
The researchers found that while hospitalized patients were more likely to have these cognitive issues, some persons who were treated in emergency departments but not admitted to the hospital also developed the problems.
The findings add to mounting evidence that COVID-19 infection can have long-term repercussions for those who survive the disease.
It's likely that the sample was biased, according to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researchers, because some of the participants may have gone to the Mount Sinai Health System for health reasons.
However, the researchers pointed out that the study's findings raise concerns about patients' long-term therapy and that more research is needed to identify risk factors for cognitive difficulties as well as rehabilitation methods.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists trouble thinking or concentrating - known as "brain fog" - as a post-COVID-19 symptom.
Although most patients with COVID-19 recover within a few weeks of becoming unwell, some people develop post-COVID symptoms, according to its website. Post-COVID conditions are a wide range of new, returning, or chronic health problems that people can have four or more weeks after being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.
As a new disease, there's a lot more to learn about COVID-19 and its long- and short-term effects.
