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Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

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Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#111
post #35

The title is misleading, at least on the IQ claim. The underlying study was observational and did not claim causation. Medical journals and their associated media summaries are awash with low-certainty studies that get de-nuanced and overhyped. These studies are relatively easy to do - not to denigrate the work put in by the original study authors (it’s not their fault the press sensationalize their work). But for st…

It says "studies suggest"; how much more hedging do you want?

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#112
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia has a population of 26 million, longer life expectancy than the USofA, and comprehensive medical records going back many decades. With ~98% of the population COVID vaccinated multiple times any vaccine effects would stick out like dogs balls. If anyone wants to posit "vaccines cause { stupid | strokes | etc }" Then such correlations should be readily apparent in the before | after records of 26 million test…

Australia's excess death rate is still higher than pre-covid: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-20/mortality-rates-austr... . If the Australian government released the data it'd be trivial to identify whether these deaths were concentrated in the vaccinated or the unvaccinated, but so far it hasn't released such data (if it even possesses such data in aggregate format).

Good that Australia is not the only country in the world, indeed. In the US, there was a measurable change in death rates once Blue states (Democrats) got vaccinated by May of 2021. Red states, led by Trumpism, where right wing media trumpeted vaccine conspiracy theories, which lowered their vaccination rate, had higher death rates.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828...

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#113
post #35

The title is misleading, at least on the IQ claim. The underlying study was observational and did not claim causation. Medical journals and their associated media summaries are awash with low-certainty studies that get de-nuanced and overhyped. These studies are relatively easy to do - not to denigrate the work put in by the original study authors (it’s not their fault the press sensationalize their work). But for st…

[flagged]

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#114
That's not exlusive to covid, but happens with all acute infections. It has long been known that the number of infections correlate with IQ loss.

"People with five or more hospital contacts with infections had an IQ score of 9.44 lower than the average."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521095016.h...

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#115
post #56
post #16

Is there any real world test where higher IQ people do better than anyone else deterministically? I am not talking about correlations. I am talking about people with higher IQ can solve X problem that people with lower IQs can't. Not the ability to spot back & white patterns on a screen. The riches people are not the highest IQ people The Noble Prize Winners are not the highest IQ people The best sports players are n…

IQ tests being useful and IQ bragging or judgement being stupid are not mutually exclusive

This makes sense. Making any sort of judgment based on IQ scores is stupid but IQ test scores are useful because

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#116
post #35

The title is misleading, at least on the IQ claim. The underlying study was observational and did not claim causation. Medical journals and their associated media summaries are awash with low-certainty studies that get de-nuanced and overhyped. These studies are relatively easy to do - not to denigrate the work put in by the original study authors (it’s not their fault the press sensationalize their work). But for st…

It's less misleading then you might think.

There are cases (enough to not be treated as just some random coincidence; with and without vaccination) where people after Covid had a sever reduction of cognitive abilities that they have problems filling out relatively simple forms. So we can clearly speak of a reduction of IQ.

And while there is a lot of research needed and a lot of open questions and already half a year (or so?) into the pandemic we did know from how we observed COVID affecting the brain that it likely will cause a reduction in cognitive abilities at least in some cases which matches the (very many) observations we had since then.

This also matches what we know from other older studies about other virus infections which have some similarity with covid, e.g. causing Neuroinflammation. So every thing we observe and do know about the underlying mechanics implies that there is very likely a causation. (Through we need more studies for Neuroinflammation.)

So scientist do need to research it more and do need to pin down the exact mechanisms this causes reduction of cognitive abilities in some cases to largely varying degrees and how much of it is a direct and a indirect e.g. psychological effect.

But for everyone else it best to assume that getting COVID might reduce IQ if they are unlucky. Because if you aren't a doctor, scientist or similar but just a random person who got COVID it kind doesn't matter if your IQ gets reduced by COVID directly or indirectly or just correlated due to some other factor you don't know about and in turn can't systematically avoid.

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia's excess death rate is still higher than pre-covid: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-20/mortality-rates-austr... . If the Australian government released the data it'd be trivial to identify whether these deaths were concentrated in the vaccinated or the unvaccinated, but so far it hasn't released such data (if it even possesses such data in aggregate format).

Well, in that case, good that Australia isn't the only country in the world: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... which clearly shows that all-cause deaths in England were higher among the unvaccinated. Here is a Reuters fact check: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/no-evidence-link-uk-exces...

The UK ONS data used to have the obvious flaw that people dropping dead 3 days after their first dose were defined as „unvaccinated“. In this regard, the significant uptick in deaths in summer 2021 in „unvaccinated“ looked interesting to say the least.

How are they doing their definitions now? Could not find it.

Meanwhile this new Dutch data looks quite interesting, maybe someone here would like to give it a shot:

https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2022/sterfte-e...

https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/

By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product. Meanwhile governments all over the world continue to be reluctant to issue data on e.g. „long covid“ or immune system problems in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated, although this data would settle the debate once and for all if its outcome is in favor of getting the shots.

„Fact checkers“ have been shown again and again to be politically biased up to active manipulation. Only people who always agree with the politics they want to push have not noticed at this point.

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#118

That's not exlusive to covid, but happens with all acute infections. It has long been known that the number of infections correlate with IQ loss. "People with five or more hospital contacts with infections had an IQ score of 9.44 lower than the average." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521095016.h...

Permanent impairment or temporary? Brain cells / connections permanently gone forever, or a temporary loss of some nutrients in the brain that can be recovered later on?

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost impossible to compare IQ tests across countries, because cognition test results are really only valid for people from the cultural context the test was written for.

If true, this seems quite damning for IQ as a metric. If the kilogram varied across countries, we would be in big trouble.

One of them is https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16123251/ but there's a few more.

Anyway, it seems obvious it's culture dependent. Given a person with usual western education and a person who's never dealt with shapes and abstract straight lines in their life - would you expect them to score similarly if they're both very intelligent people? These tests heavily rely on geometric puzzles which already make an assumption about education. The tricky question is how much does that affect differences you'd see between random people tested for comparison.

Re: Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

#120

My wife has postcovid and this is a profound effect. Yesterday she tried to add up a series of numbers by heart, and she simply couldn’t. For context, she’s pretty mathy and used to mock me for taking out a calculator or a spreadsheet for stuff like that. She also forgets everything, which is another thing she used to be great at. It’s pretty confronting, especially now that the idea that maybe this isn’t temporary i…

I watched my partner have a very bad run in with Epstein-Barr Virus (a decade ago). Wiped her out for months and months. It took years before she was back to 100%.

It might not be clear what all the causes of long-covid, brain fog are but it's definitely possible for viruses to have long lasting and poorly studied impacts.

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