Investigating brain cortical activity in patients with post-COVID-19 brain fog 2023 Wojcik et al

Brain fog is a kind of mental problem, similar to chronic fatigue syndrome, and appears about 3 months after the infection with COVID-19 and lasts up to 9 months. The maximum magnitude of the third wave of COVID-19 in Poland was in April 2021. The research referred here aimed at carrying out the investigation comprising the electrophysiological analysis of the patients who suffered from COVID-19 and had symptoms of brain fog (sub-cohort A), suffered from COVID-19 and did not have symptoms of brain fog (sub-cohort B), and the control group that had no COVID-19 and no symptoms (sub-cohort C).

The aim of this article was to examine whether there are differences in the brain cortical activity of these three sub-cohorts and, if possible differentiate and classify them using the machine-learning tools. he dense array electroencephalographic amplifier with 256 electrodes was used for recordings. The event-related potentials were chosen as we expected to find the differences in the patients' responses to three different mental tasks arranged in the experiments commonly known in experimental psychology: face recognition, digit span, and task switching. These potentials were plotted for all three patients' sub-cohorts and all three experiments. The cross-correlation method was used to find differences, and, in fact, such differences manifested themselves in the shape of event-related potentials on the cognitive electrodes. The discussion of such differences will be presented; however, an explanation of such differences would require the recruitment of a much larger cohort. In the classification problem, the avalanche analysis for feature extractions from the resting state signal and linear discriminant analysis for classification were used. The differences between sub-cohorts in such signals were expected to be found. Machine-learning tools were used, as finding the differences with eyes seemed impossible. Indeed, the A&B vs. C, B&C vs. A, A vs. B, A vs. C, and B vs. C classification tasks were performed, and the efficiency of around 60–70% was achieved.

In future, probably there will be pandemics again due to the imbalance in the natural environment, resulting in the decreasing number of species, temperature increase, and climate change-generated migrations. The research can help to predict brain fog after the COVID-19 recovery and prepare the patients for better convalescence. Shortening the time of brain fog recovery will be beneficial not only for the patients but also for social conditions.

Open access, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2023.1019778/full

 

This sounds like trying to understand the molecular cause of schizophrenia by classifying against the specific content of delusions. The intro and outro in the abstract are also a bit weird. I mean the last paragraph is true, but seems an irrelevant waste of space. Glad they're confident that brain fog lasts a maximum of nine months...

 

It's pretty demoralizing that the general patterns seem to be impossible to grasp. It really hasn't sunk in that brain fog has been known and described for a long time in many conditions. Even formally. But always separate, no dots connected.

It's common during and after chemotherapy. There's even a term for it: chemo fog. Fibromyalgia has its own version of it: fibro fog, although I think that's only used by the patients. It's common after TBIs and many infectious diseases. It's pretty similar to hypoxia.

All because of the extreme... I think Balkanization is almost warranted here... where specialties work in isolation and there is no one connecting them. That's what I don't get, how there isn't any general medicine. GPs ain't it, it's not the same thing. The closest is internal medicine and even then, they seem to work in isolation anyway.

I had low expectations about how long and difficult it would be for medicine to see all the patterns lit up by COVID, but I never understood just how dysfunctional it all is. There is no big picture thinking, it's all tunnel vision with many filters.

For all the mythology around the connections in the brain and how important they are, medicine feels like a bunch of organs without a conductor. The organism is lacking a nervous system, basically.

Even this paper concludes talking about it in terms of future pandemics. It doesn't notice the iceberg underneath. I think this is mainly a consequence of how detached medicine made itself from the lived experience of patients. I don't think you can be objective about illness and health. Biology, sure. Not illness. Even health can't be defined much better than the absence of illness or injury. This isn't working.

 

EEG, I suppose neuropsychology has to go through these motions, but next the neurofeedback practitioners (mostly psychologists but also some nurses etc) will be getting excited and start fiddling around with their equipment and using them on pwLC citing this literature incorrectly.

 

I have come across brain fog attributed as a 'kind of mental problem' when being referred to as a neurocognitive symptom. For example, symptoms related to cognition are assigned to the mental category within brain injury medicine. But it's mental problems following brain injury, so it has an organic cause.

During brain fog, mental sharpness diminishes and when it resolves, mental acuity returns to baseline levels.

[Edited for clarity]