“These emerging and complementary findings broadly highlight that yes, there is cognitive impairment in long-term coronavirus survivors — it is a real phenomenon,” said James C. Jackson, a neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.
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He and other experts noted that the findings were consistent with smaller studies that found signs of cognitive impairment.
The new study also found reasons for optimism, suggesting that if people's long Covid symptoms subside, associated cognitive impairment may also occur: People who experienced long Covid symptoms for several months and eventually recovered had similar cognitive scores to those who did not. Of a quick recovery. The study found.
On a typical intelligence scale, people who score from 85 to 115 are considered to have average intelligence. The standard divergence is about 15 points, so a shift of 3 points is not usually considered significant, and a shift of even 6 points may not be significant, experts said.
“The question is: Are people able to function at their routine capacity in whatever they do? That's not really being answered,” said Dr. Igor Koralnik, chief of the Division of Infectious Neuroscience and Global Neuroscience at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, who was not involved in the study. Three points more or less.
He added: “Assigning X's on the IQ scale is less important than people's awareness of the cognitive difficulties they face.”
However, Jackson, the author of a book about the long coronavirus, called DefoggingWhile cognitive tests like those in the study “identify relatively mild deficits,” he said, minor difficulties can be significant for some people. For example, he said, “If you're an engineer and you have a slight decline in executive functioning, that's a problem.”
The study, led by researchers at Imperial College London, included 112,964 adults who completed the online cognitive assessment during the last five months of 2022. About 46,000 of them, or 41 per cent, said they had never had Covid. Another 46,000 people who were infected with the Corona virus said that their illness lasted less than four weeks.
This article originally appeared on New York times.
