The lasting mental impacts of severe COVID-19 on areas like memory, attention, or problem solving, may be equivalent to 20 years of ageing.
These are the findings of a new study, led by a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, which suggest that cognitive impairment as a result of severe COVID-19 is similar to that sustained between 50 and 70 years of age and is the equivalent to losing 10 IQ points.
These are the findings of a new study, led by a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, which suggest that cognitive impairment as a result of severe COVID-19 is similar to that sustained between 50 and 70 years of age and is the equivalent to losing 10 IQ points.
The research, published in the journal eClinicalMedicine, indicates the effects are still detectable more than six months after acute illness and that any recovery is at best gradual. According to the researchers, this is the first time that such rigorous assessment and comparison has been carried out in relation to the after-effects of severe COVID-19.
Professor Adam Hampshire from the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, and first author of the study, said: “Tens of thousands of people have been through intensive care with COVID-19 in England alone and many more will have been very sick, but not admitted to hospital. Here, we analysed data from 81,337 individuals who completed the full extended questionnaire in order to test the hypothesis that those who had recovered from COVID-19 would show objective cognitive deficits when performing tests of attention, working memory, problem solving and emotional processing. It comprised a sequence of nine tests from the broader library that is available on our server system based on prior data showing that they can be used to measure distinct aspects of human cognition, spanning planning/reasoning, working memory, attention and emotion processing abilities, in a manner that is sensitive to population variables of interest whilst being robust against the type of device that a person is tested on.
After the nine cognitive tests, participants were presented with a detailed questionnaire with items capturing a broad range of socio-demographic, economic, vocational and lifestyle variables. People who indicated that they had suspected having COVID-19 were presented further questions including whether they had breathing difficulties and what happened as a consequence of their breathing difficulties.
People who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness, depression and anxiety. The deficits were of substantial effect size for people who had been hospitalised, but also for non-hospitalised cases who had biological confirmation of COVID-19 infection.
Hampshire Adam’s suggestion
These results should act as a clarion call for further research with longitudinal and neuroimaging cohorts to plot recovery trajectories.
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