A new study has reached very worrying results about the long-term effects of the severe Corona virus, in addition to other effects that were previously confirmed, such as constant fatigue and brain “foggy”.
In the study published in the journal “Clinical MedicineResearchers have found that the mental effects of severe infection from the Corona virus can be equivalent to aging by 20 years, and moving, for example, from 50 years to 70 years.
According to the study, severe infection with the virus may reduce the level of intelligence by 10 points after six months of infection.
The research, which included 46 patients, showed that the recorded changes differed from early dementia or general aging.
“Cognitive impairment is common in a wide range of neurological disorders, including dementia, and even routine aging, but the patterns we saw in the cognitive ‘fingerprint’ of Covid were distinct,” says neuroscientist David Menon of the University of Cambridge in the UK, who was the study’s lead author. about it all.”
The study aims to closely investigate the severity of the cognitive changes that follow severe cases of infection, so that they can be understood and mitigated.
Lead researcher and cognitive scientist Adam Hampshire of Imperial College London says: “Tens of thousands of people have been in intensive care due to corona in England alone, and many more will have become severely ill, but they have not been admitted to hospital.”
“This means that there are a large number of people who still have cognitive problems after several months. We urgently need to look at what can be done to help these people.”
The experiment included 46 people who were admitted to Addenbrooke Hospital in Cambridge as a result of Covid between March and July 2020, and six of them were placed under artificial respiration.
An average of six months after their injury, the researchers gave them a test called a Cognitron to see their performance in areas such as memory, attention, and thinking, as well as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The results showed that those recovering from acute Covid-19 were less accurate and had slower response times than the general population, and the magnitude of cognitive loss was similar to the effects of aging between 50 and 70 years of age.