Studies suggest that COVID can age the brain by 10 years

Preliminary research shows that COVID-19 can age the brains of some people by about 10 years compared to those who are not ill.

More than 84,000 people in the UK who said they had recovered from a suspicious or confirmed case COVID-19 people answered a questionnaire to measure their thinking skills.Paper Send to preprint server medRxivIn other words, the findings must be interpreted with caution, as they have not undergone the rigorous peer-review process required for publication in scientific journals.

Participants were tested to measure their ability to solve problems, spatial memory, attention, and how they handled emotions.

Respondents stated whether they had or suspected they had COVID-19. They were asked how long the symptoms lasted, the severity of the illness, and whether there was an underlying medical condition. Their results were compared to those of healthy participants who acted as controls.

Participants who stated they were infected with COVID-19 performed worse on cognitive tests than participants in the control group.

This association was particularly strong in patients with severe COVID-19 and was also evident in patients with mild illness. Mild COVID-19 cases were defined in the study as those who had no respiratory problems.

The team discovered a “especially noticeable problem” in what is known as higher cognition.Issues related to participants’ attention and reasoning, especially verbal reasoning, were discussed by Adam Hampshire, a research co-author of the Brain Sciences Division at Imperial College London, England. Newsweek.

Patients aged 20-70 years who were hospitalized and equipped with a ventilator to assist in breathing had on average reduced thinking skills to the level of those 10 years older.

Hampshire said Newsweek The only important predictors of cognitive problems were the severity of respiratory symptoms and positive tests in patients. Another variable that explains the problem the team observed was, he said, as if a person had an existing state.

The team suggests that their data “have chronic cognitive consequences of having COVID-19” and that COVID-19 patients have complications such as stroke, immune system overreaction, etc. Inflammation said their work would come in the face of increasing evidence from another study that they could suffer from neurological problems.

“These results should serve as a clear call for more detailed research to investigate the basis of cognitive impairment in people who survive SARS-COV-2 [coronavirus] Infectious diseases, “the authors write.

Experts who were not involved in the study said the findings did not prove that COVID-19 causes thinking problems.

In the statement, Joanna Wardlow, Applied Professor Neuroimaging At the University of Edinburgh, UK Research was limited because the team did not have information about participants’ cognitive function prior to being infected with COVID-19. She said the problems they found might also be short-term.

Derek Hill, Professor medicaI Imaging science at UCL In The UK said in a statement that the study was “intriguing but not definitive.” He said the information might be unreliable because the researchers depended on the participants reporting their symptoms, and that only “a small portion” were positive for the coronavirus test.

Hill also said the team did not investigate how COVID-19 biologically affects the brain, for example by scanning. “It is well known that cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease is associated with brain contraction as measured by MRI scans,” Hill said.

David Strain, Senior Clinical Lecturer at University Exeter, Britain, in a statement, some brains COVID-19 About 10 years old compared to a person without illness is “much worse” than that found in others who have recovered from other viruses.

The team is still recruiting people for their research, and it can be completed by Please click here. Results are limited, as only 361 of the 84,000 participants were virus-positive. According to Hampshire, this number reflects the proportion of the UK population that had been tested for the virus at the time the study was conducted. “We are still recruiting and will track people to see if they are suffering from cognitive decline if they have COVID-19,” he said.