Lexical retrieval difficulties in post-COVID-19 syndrome: Insights from verbal fluency and naming tasks, 2024, González-Nosti+

Lexical retrieval difficulties in post-COVID-19 syndrome: Insights from verbal fluency and naming tasks
María González-Nosti; Arrate Barrenechea; Romina San Miguel-Abella; María del Carmen Pérez-Sánchez; Lucía Fernández-Manzano; Ainhoa Ramírez-Arjona; Noelia Rodríguez-Pérez; Elena Herrera

BACKGROUND
Although considerable research has been conducted on postCOVID-19 syndrome (PCS), cognitive symptoms, particularly those related to language, are still not well understood.

AIMS
To provide a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of language performance in PCS patients using a comprehensive set of semantic and verbal production tasks.

METHODS & PROCEDURES
The study involved 195 PCS patients aged 26–64 years and 50 healthy controls aged 25–61 years. Participants were assessed using two semantic tasks, three naming tasks and four types of verbal fluency tasks, designed to evaluate different aspects of language processing.

OUTCOMES & RESULTS
PCS patients demonstrated significantly poorer performance compared with controls across all verbal fluency tasks. This was evident in both the total number of words generated and their types, with patients tending to choose more easily accessible words. In naming tasks, the pattern of errors was similar in both groups, although patients showed a higher number of nonresponses and made more errors, reflecting difficulties in word retrieval. The analysis highlighted the impact of factors such as stimulus availability, educational level and cognitive reserve on performance. Notably, younger patients performed worse than older, a paradoxical trend also observed in previous research.

CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS
These findings reveal significant word retrieval difficulties in PCS patients, suggesting that cognitive impairment related to language may be more pronounced than previously understood. The results underscore the need for a thorough evaluation of language functions in PCS patients and the development of more targeted and individualized language rehabilitation strategies to address these specific challenges.

Link | PDF (International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders) [Open Access]

 

"Just do the magical rehabilitation thing!"

Seriously, why don't they just abandon all treatments and just always do generic rehabilitation, if it works so well? You rehabilitate people. They are rehabilitated. It's so simple! Why bother doing anything else when for every specific problem that is poorly understood it's assumed that generic rehabilitation must work, is simply asserted to work?

If the problem with this is that some problems are actually understood, but rehabilitation works even better, then just, I don't know, erase all the useful knowledge and use the magical rehabilitation thing that works 100% of the time, as long as you only count the times it barely seems to somehow possibly may be on the way to somewhat be of help to some because in evidence-based medicine they count it as 100% safe and effective anyway.

No more drugs or surgeries or anything else. Just rehabilitate. After all, if someone has been rehabilitated, they are no longer debilitated. It's so easy to do this stuff people should pay me a lot for superior insights like this. Using all the money wasted on useless generic rehabilitation for specific problems. It's not as if it's put to any productive use anyway.

 

Anybody with an unknown, un researched illness can be rehabilitated via regular means.

 

I have not yet read the paper and it is great to see attempts to define specific cognitive issues, however word finding difficulties are notoriously non specific: the neurocognitive equivalent of the physical symptoms of such as headaches or fatigue.

[Corrected typos]