Scientists are starting to confirm what doctors, patients, and their families can already see: Older patients who have had COVID-19 have a higher risk of getting dementia.
of people who recover from COVID-19 get “brain fog,” a non-scientific term used to describe slow or sluggish thinking. While this is disturbing at any age, it can be particularly upsetting to older patients and their caregivers, who fear they’re having or witnessing not just an after-effect of a disease, but the start of a permanent loss of thinking skills.
Joshua Cahan, MD, a cognitive neurologist at Northwestern University, advises caution about applying such a specific label simply from a patient’s medical chart. After all, he notes, few patients get tested to confirm that they have the proteins linked to Alzheimer’s. Scientific understanding of brain fog is “part of an emerging picture that inflammation elsewhere in the body can be transmitted to become inflammation in the brain,” Monje says. “And once there's inflammation in the brain … that can dysregulate other cell types that normally support healthy cognitive function.”
But specialized, directed testing can find some probable signs, says Cahan, who evaluates patient cognition in a long COVID clinic at Northwestern University.“Patients do have a complaint that something's changed, and we don't have prior testing,” he says. “So it's possible that they were maybe in the high normal range or the superior range, but you just don't know.”
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