Covid and Brain Fog
Covid makes some people feel like they are in a mental fog. When sick, people frequently report this cognitive symptom. They can’t think well, forget things, can’t process information, and experience difficulties with tasks that once seemed easy. For most people, this brain fog dissipates as they start to recover.
For people with long Covid, however, cognitive symptoms are often a critical aspect of the problems. In a
recent article, Ed Yong provided a disturbing and sad picture of what many people with long Covid experience. For many, their cognitive problems are severe enough that they experience challenges doing many activities they have done for years. Some have been unable to return to their previous jobs because they can no longer perform the same cognitive tasks.
Last year, when first writing about
Covid brain fog, I described a longitudinal study of the cognitive effects of Covid. Hampshire and colleagues (2021) had cognitive performance information on a large sample as part of an ongoing study. In a follow-up set of measures, they found that people who had Covid during the first year of the pandemic showed long-term cognitive declines. These declines were large enough to compare to a seven-point
IQ drop.
And I will simply note that we have a good friend who now has chronic fatigue syndrome, for which Covid was a contributing factor. Our friend can no longer do many of the challenging cognitive tasks she used to do easily. Like the people that Ed Yong described, she also can have serious exhaustion and other physical symptoms following even modest cognitive exertion–such as having emotional conversations or a conversation with additional noise in the background.
