Covid-19 could age the brain by ten years

Reading time: 2 min – Spotted on HuffPost

Scientists know that Covid-19 leaves traces on our body in the more or less long term. As studies multiply to understand the inner workings, one of them has just come to an alarming discovery: people recovering from the disease could have a mental decline equivalent to a brain aging of ten years.

Posted online on the MedRxiv website, the study was led by Adam Hampshire, a physician at Imperial College London. It analyzed the results of cognitive tests of 84,285 people who have contracted Covid-19 or suspected of having contracted it.

These tests, used in particular to check the performance of people with Alzheimer’s, assess the ability to solve problems, focus attention and manage emotions, explains HuffPost.

In general, the results show that individuals who have had Covid-19 perform worse than those who have not been infected.

Worse, people who have had a severe form of the disease – who had to be hospitalized for example – had cognitive impacts. “Equivalent to a ten-year average decline in their overall performance, between the ages of 20 and 70».

Limitations of the study

While this study sheds more light on the impact of this virus on the body, its results should be taken with a grain of salt.

As Newsweek reports, this is only a preliminary study, and has yet to be reviewed by other scientists – which should be done shortly.

In addition, the cognitive scores of patients – some of whom are uncertain of having been infected – were not measured before infection, but only after contracting the disease. It is therefore impossible to measure a decline.

Finally, the study does not specify whether this damage disappears over time or whether, conversely, it lasts.