Hospitalization due to the Covid it could age the brain by twenty years. It is the result of a study – funded by the British government – carried out by experts from the University of Cambridgewhich explains how the effect equates to a loss of approx ten points of one’s IQ (IQ). Dozens of studies have found Covid to damage brain function, but scientists have explained that this is the first of its kind to rigorously assess its impact.
The Cambridge study
The researchers tested the cognitive abilities of 46 patients with an average age of 51 who were hospitalized with the virus in 2020. One third of these had been linked to ventilators. They have been subjected to a series of memory, attention and reasoning tests six months after their illness. The results showed that Covid survivors were less accurate on average and had slower response times than the control group. Covid survivors scored particularly low on tasks where they had to find the appropriate words for a problem, a test called ‘verbal analogy’.
This, the authors said, was a commonly reported problem among those who experienced post-Covid ‘brain fog’. The results also showed that patients who required mechanical ventilation scored the worst on the tests, indicating that disease severity is a driving factor in cognitive decline. long Covid. The study, which also involved researchers from Imperial College London, said cognitive impairment in Covid survivors was similar to that seen as people age 50 to 70. While some patients had shown “gradual” cognitive improvement 10 months after their illness, the authors argued that some may never fully recover their former intelligence.
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The prospects
Neuroscientist Professor David Menon, author of the study, said that while some patients showed improvement over time, it was slow and some may never regain their previous cognitive abilities. “We followed some patients for up to ten months after their acute infection, so we were able to see very slow improvement,” he said. But it is very likely that some of these will never fully recover. ” Echoing previous studies, the scholars said this premature aging could be due to the virus reducing oxygen to the brain or inflammation of brain tissues that occurs as the body attempts to fight Covid.