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Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

medrxiv.org

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Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#41

Post by thespoonbends »

andix wrote: post #17

Does this study take in account, that people who are hospitalized are probably less healthy than a control group, and maybe already have more cognitive deficits then a control group before getting hospitalized?

It does not.

It mentions "One might posit that people with lower cognitive ability have higher risk of catching the virus. We consider such a relationship plausible; however, it would not explain why the observed deficits varied in scale with respiratory symptom severity.".

That is, it attributes that potential causal link as raising incidence of infection (e.g. they may choose to gather in crowds indoors), not as raising the impact of infection.

Either way, as a cross-sectional study, it doesn't establish causation, but may be a smoking gun.

Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#42

Post by minitech »

st1x7 wrote: post #13
kasperni wrote: post #2

From the conclusion: "The scale of the observed deficits was not insubstantial; the 0.57 SD global composite score reduction for the hospitalised with ventilator sub-group was equivalent to the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 512 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke (-0.40SDs) and the 1016 who…

Reduction equivalent to the cognitive decline of aging 10 years and larger than the cognitive decline of suffering a stroke? Sounds pretty substantial to me.

“not insubstantial” :)

Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#43

Post by [deleted] »

redis_mlc wrote: post #6
isoprophlex wrote: post #3

By no means do I want to detract from the severity of covid infections, but a very important question to answer would be "what's the effect of psychotrauma resulting from illness and hospitalization on cognitive function" I feel that my own cognitive functions have declined as well during the pandemic, due to stress and uncertainty alone. I haven't been infected, mind you.

> "what's the effect of psychotrauma resulting from illness and hospitalization on cognitive function" Ventilators are extremely physically traumatic - those patients are considered to be the sickest in any hospital.

[deleted]

Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#44

Post by woeirua »

It seems that if you develop severe respiratory issues with Covid that you’re going to be hypoxic for a long time, and potentially with very low O2 saturations. Under those conditions, I frankly would be surprised if we didn’t see signs of cognitive impairment.

Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#45

Post by bildung »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #10
redis_mlc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the hospitalised with ventilator sub-group So this affects almost nobody then, and is probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization and ventilator organ damage, aside from corona.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted - here’s a page about post-intensive care syndrome, on the website of the society for critical care medicine, that’s concordant with what you said: https://www.sccm.org/MyICUCare/THRIVE/Post-intensive-Care-Sy...

Probably because according to the paper, Covid-positive patients not on ventilators also had the mental impairment problems, only to a lesser degree.

Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#46

Post by dempseye »

minitech wrote: post #42
st1x7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reduction equivalent to the cognitive decline of aging 10 years and larger than the cognitive decline of suffering a stroke? Sounds pretty substantial to me.

“not in substantial” :)

This is a very English way of expressing oneself.

Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#47

Post by jansan »

cedex12 wrote: post #20

On the subject of side/long term effects of covid: I've heard, second-hand from doctors/physicians, that the long term effects of covid are not necessarily that bad compared to e.g. the flu. The argument being that: 1. covid has been one of the most studied viruses of this kind, so that you have good chances of stumbling upon lots of size effects, simply due to the sheer size of scrutiny. 2. a bad flu also can yield…

The flu can be nasty. I had a severe case a few years back, and IMO I never fully recovered from it. I consider myself healthy, but I feel that this flu was like getting five years older within two week.

Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#48

Post by murgindrag »

hejja wrote: post #26
pedro-guimaraes wrote: post #7

Much is still to be discovered about the virus, science only knows the effects after less than 1 year. The question is, what could long-term effects of this virus? (let's in 10-20 years)

true, yet the same can be said of: - any new pharmaceutical - diets (keto, carnivore, etc) - 5g etc point being: modifying behavior due to decade time-horizon unknowns is not really pragmatic.

It kind of is. If you see a country next to yours building up a massive army, and starting propaganda about your government being evil, that's a good reason to prepare. If we learned of alien life in the galaxy, we might want to prepare too.

And with diets and diseases, if something has a short-horizon effect, that's good evidence it might have a long time-horizon effect too.

The seriousness with which I respond to COVID19 is mostly due to short time-horizon effects giving strong implications of possible long time-horizon effects. I'm less concerned about the 3% CFR as I am about the larger portion of individuals who might have long-term disability, lower economic output, etc. If that passes, we'll be feeling that for many decades.

Re: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

#50

Post by NumberCruncher »

kmm wrote: post #27

13050 people report having had covid, but only 361 had had a positive test? How reliable is it that those without a test actually had covid? What if people with lower cognitive ability are more likely to falsely report having had it. > Only a small proportion (0.76%) of participants reported having residual symptoms, Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it seems wrong to calculate that rate over all participants. S…

> What if people with lower cognitive ability are more likely to falsely report having had it.

And that's why we generally shouldn't base studies on self reported data. If you had the opportunity to compare self reported data to empiric data (measured, tracked, etc.) you wouldn't believe self reported data any more, because it's heavily biased.

BTW I am pretty sure we could observe significant cognitive deficits by people abducted by aliens as well...

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