The effect for the long COVID group was comparable to a ten-year increase in age, or experiencing mild to moderate distress versus no distress. For example, we saw that older people and people experiencing psychological distress scored lower in the tests. These people meet the criteria for having long COVID.īy also testing how other factors affected test scores, we were able to put into context how big an impact COVID had. When we compared how accurately people with or without a history of COVID completed the test in the first round, we saw that people with an infection had lower scores on average across the 12 tasks.ĭigging deeper, we saw that the effect of COVID on test performance was biggest for people with a longer symptom duration of more than three months. How COVID can disturb your sleep and dreams – and what could help We then recorded how accurately people completed the tasks and their response times. Similar versions of the test are available for anyone to try online. Other tasks included watching sequences of numbers appear on the screen and then repeating the sequences, clicking on a moving “bullseye” target, and deciding if pairs of words have the same meaning.
Some tasks involved remembering words and shapes after a short delay of less than a minute, or a longer delay of around 20 minutes. The tasks aimed to cover a range of elements of brain function, including visual memory, attention, verbal reasoning and motor control. The study includes over 8,000 people both with and without a history of COVID infection and with a range of shorter- and longer-term COVID symptoms. The COVID Symptom Study Biobank is a study that began in 2020, recruiting people from the COVID Symptom Study smartphone app (now the ZOE Health Study) which tracks symptoms and COVID tests. Another 2,400 completed the second round, of whom 1,700 had also participated in the first round. In the first round, more than 3,300 people completed the test.
#Brain fog and covid series#
To test cognitive skills, we invited participants in the COVID Symptom Study Biobank to complete a series of 12 brain-training-style tasks online in July 2021 and again in April 2022.
We found people with persistent symptoms fared worse in these tests up to two years after a COVID infection. In a new study, my colleagues and I set out to understand whether a COVID infection, and symptom duration, affected performance in cognitive tests, and how test performance changed over time. So to support people in the short and longer term, it’s important to understand the nature, size and duration of the effects of brain fog and long COVID more generally on cognitive function.
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