People who had previously been infected with Covid-19 were more likely to develop a set of brain damage a year after recovery than people who had never had the coronavirus, U.S. researchers revealed on Thursday.
The one-year study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, focused on using the medical records of millions of veterans in the United States to assess brain health in patients with 44 different diseases.
The results demonstrate the devastating long-term effects of COVID-19 infection, lead researcher Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of the University of Washington School of Medicine said in a statement.
The results of the study concluded:
Memory impairment, commonly referred to as brain fog, is the most common symptom. By comparing different groups, the study concluded that people with COVID-19 were 77 percent more likely to experience memory problems.
People with the virus were 50% more likely to have a stroke due to a blood clot than people who had never had the virus.
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Former Covid-19 patients were 80% more likely to have brain disease, 43% more likely to have mental health problems such as anxiety or depression, 35% more likely to have headaches, and 42% more likely to have movement disorders, such as tremor, compared to other groups.
Al-Ali and colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine, in collaboration with the St. Louis Health Care System's Department of Veterans Affairs, examined the medical records of 154,000 U.S. veterans who tested positive for COVID-19 from March 1, 2020 through 2021 January 15th.
They compared those records with data from 5.6 million patients who were not infected with COVID-19 over the same time period and another group of 5.8 million people before the virus arrived in the United States.
Patients with previous COVID-19 infections had brain and other neurological conditions at 7 percent higher rates than a similar group of veterans who had never had the disease. The team said the study's findings could be relevant to the nearly 6.6 million Americans with brain disabilities who have been injured by Covid-19.
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