Imperial College London (ICL) researchers have revealed that people who have recovered from COVID-19 could have small but long-lasting impacts on the performance of cognitive and memory tasks.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the REACT Long COVID study enrolled over 140,000 participants, including long COVID patients, who undertook at least one cognitive task.
COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. For some patients, the condition can lead to long COVID, where symptoms can last up to 12 weeks.
Using an innovative online cognitive assessment via the Cognitron platform, researchers detected subtle changes in different areas of brain function, including memory, reasoning, executive function, attention and impulsivity.
The study revealed small deficits that were still detectable after a year or more following infection, including in people who had a short duration of the illness.
For people who experienced long COVID, these deficits were much larger, as well as for those who had been hospitalised or infected with one of the early SARS-CoV-2 virus variants.
The results were associated with several areas of cognition, particularly memory, such as the ability to remember pictures of objects that were viewed a few minutes prior.
Researchers suggest that this could be due to problems forming new memories as opposed to accelerated forgetting.
Additionally, a proportion of individuals showed small deficits in some tasks testing executive and reasoning abilities, including those that required spatial planning or verbal reasoning.
Professor Adam Hampshire, department of brain sciences, ICL and first author of the study, commented: “Our online platform… [was] able to detect small but measurable deficits in cognitive task performance” and “found that people were likely affected in different ways depending on factors such as illness duration, virus variant and hospitalisation”.
In February, another study led by Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons reported that SARS-CoV-2 can infect dopamine neurones in the brain, triggering senescence, a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease.
