New Delhi: Infection with SARS-CoV-2 has a significant impact on cognitive function in patients with preexisting dementia, according to new research led by health experts from West Bengal. Since the first wave of Covid-19, neurologists have noticed both acute and long-term neurological impact of this infectious disease. While insights Covid's effect on human cognition has remained unclear, neurologists have often referred to it as "brain fog" - an ambiguous terminology.
To better describe the cognitive effects, the team proposed a new term: 'FADE-IN MEMORY' (that is, fatigue, decreased fluency, attention deficit, depression, executive dysfunction, slowed information processing speed, and subcortical memory impairment)." They investigated the effects of Covid-19 on cognitive impairment in 14 patients with preexisting dementia (four with Alzheimer's, five with vascular dementia, three with Parkinson's, and two with the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia), who had suffered further cognitive deterioration following Covid-19.
The results, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports, showed that patients with all subtypes of dementia experienced rapidly progressive dementia following infection with SARS-CoV-2. "As the ageing population and dementia are increasing globally, we believe pattern recognition of Covid-19-associated cognitive deficits is urgently needed to distinguish between Covid-19-associated cognitive impairments per se and other types of dementia," said Dr. Souvik Dubey, from the Department of Neuromedicine, at Bangur Institute of Neurosciences (BIN), Kolkata.