Having COVID-19 could accelerate mental decline by up to 10 years. This is reflected in a new study published by Imperial College London and other British and American universities.
The effect is called “COVID-19 in the Long Term” and intensifies according to the complications faced by the patient.The affectation would be derived from complications of the virus, such as cerebrovascular accidents, encephalopathy, inflammatory syndrome, microbleeds or an atypical immune response.
Results
For the measurement, an intelligence test was applied to more than 84,000 recovered patients.The results were compared with the averages of people with the same conditions who had not suffered from COVID-19.The study also highlighted a more severe effect in those who had not received medical attention during the illness.
COVID-19 is still being discovered
The finding comes almost a year after the disease emerged in China, whose effects and treatments remain under investigation. This at the same time as the production of the vaccine is accelerated.
Among other alterations, the study found difficulties in problem solving, spatial memory, selective attention, and emotion processing.”The nature of the deficit is related to the severity of respiratory symptoms measured by level of medical assistance,” the document indicates.
Thus, the most profound effects appear at the two extremes: those who were not treated and those who went into intensive care.Even among these, a deepened effect was identified among those patients who were connected to a ventilator, showing the most important affectation.
5 deadly characteristics of the virus
The scientific community has wondered: what about this virus? What are the quirks in your biology that pose a unique threat to our bodies and our lives?
1. Master of deception:
In the early stages of an infection the virus is capable of deceiving the body. The Coronavirus may be running rampant in our lungs and airways, yet our immune systems think everything is fine.
2. Behaves like a killer on the run:
The amount of virus in our body begins to peak the day before we start to get sick. But it takes at least a week before COVID-19 progresses to the point where the infected person needs hospital treatment.
3. It’s new, thus our bodies are unprepared:
There are four other human Coronaviruses, all of which cause symptoms of the common cold. But this is different. This is a new one so there isn’t much pre-immunity.
4. Building an immune defense from scratch is a real problem for older people:
Learning how to fight a new infection involves a lot of trial and error on the part of the immune system. But in old age we produce a less diverse set of T cells, a central component of the immune system.
5. Produces peculiar and unexpected events in the body:
COVID starts out as lung disease (even there it does strange and unusual things) and can end up affecting the whole body.
