MANY COVID-19 survivors battle ‘brain fog’ in the weeks or months following.
But a new study sought to measure the illness’s effect on people whose brain function has already begun deteriorating.
Having Covid-19 can speed up the progress of dementia if you already have it, research has shown
A group of researchers from universities in India and Spain monitored fourteen people who’d had Covid, who also had pre-existing dementia diagnoses.
“Most cognitive post-COVID-19 studies have been performed on previously healthy individuals without any cognitive impairment prior to the COVID-19 infection,” they wrote in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports.
They found that their dementia had rapidly progressed a year after falling sick.
Four of participants had Alzheimer’s, five had vascular dementia, three suffered from Parkinson’s disease dementia, and two from the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia.
Researchers assessed their cognitive functioning, using a few different tests that gave a picture of participants’ attention and language capabilities, memory, fluency and perception of space.
They performed these roughly three months before the patients got Covid and roughly a year afterwards, to compare how the virus had affected their brain function.
Researchers also performed MRI brain scans on the dementia patients pre- and post-Covid.
The patients experienced increase in fatigue and depression in the year after catching the virus.
Depression is very common dementia, according to the researchers, especially in Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.
Their attention, memory, fluency, language and sense of space also worsened, and brain scans showed ‘significant’ brain deterioration in a way that is typical of dementia.
“Slowly progressive dementias like Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, which usually have a fluctuating course, showed relatively unusual significant, relentless, and rapid progression in terms of deterioration […] at one year post-COVID-19,” the team observed.
“All 14 patients, one year after SARS-CoV-2 infection, had fatigue, depression, objective attention/concentration difficulties, executive dysfunctions, slowed information processing speed, and sub-cortical type memory impairments, irrespective of their previous cognitive status,” they added.
Previous studies have revealed that the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease almost doubles in older people for up to one-year after having Covid.
The Sun has also reported that patients suffering with dementia are three times more likely to develop a severe case of coronavirus.
Studies show that one in 20 people who catch Covid may permanently lose their sense of smell or taste (anosmia).
But research has warned that losing sense of smell may be a signal for dementia.
What is dementia?
Dementia isn’t a specific disease – it describes a syndrome, or a group of symptoms that regularly occur together.
These can include memory loss as well as difficulties with thinking, problem-solving or language, according to the NHS.
While these changes are often small to begin with, but for someone with dementia become severe enough to affect their day-to-day life.
Dementia begins when the brain is damaged by diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or a series of strokes.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia – but not all dementia is down to Alzheimer’s.
Others include:
Vascular dementia – where oxygen supply to the brain is reduced because of narrowing or blockage of blood vessels, damaging or killing brain cells
Mixed dementia – when someone has more than one type of dementia
Dementia with Lewy bodies – when tiny abnormal structures (Lewy bodies) develop inside brain cells, disrupting the brain’s chemistry and leading to the death of brain cells
Frontotemporal dementia (including Pick’s disease) – when front and side parts of the brain are damaged over time from batches of abnormal proteins forming inside nerve cells, causing them to die