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A recent study conducted by researchers from Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark suggests that while severe Covid-19 infections may indeed affect brain health among patients, the impact is comparable to individuals hospitalized for other diseases of similar severity, such as pneumonia or heart attacks.
Published in the JAMA Network, the study involved 345 participants, including 120 Covid-19 patients, 125 hospitalized controls for pneumonia, heart attack, or non-Covid-19 intensive care-requiring illnesses, and 100 healthy controls. The findings showed that patients with Covid-19 demonstrated compromised cognitive status in comparison to healthy controls, yet not more so than those hospitalized for other severe conditions.
Though patients with Covid-19 displayed worse performance in various psychiatric and neurological assessments compared to healthy individuals, their brain health wasn’t notably more impaired than those in the hospital control groups, except for executive dysfunction. These results persisted across multiple sensitivity analyses, highlighting consistent outcomes.
The study suggests that impaired brain health following SARS-CoV-2 infection remains prevalent even three years after the Covid-19 outbreak, aligning with observations from prior virus pandemics. While Covid-19 has been associated with over 200 symptoms affecting millions globally, brain-related symptoms, including cognitive and mental issues, have been among the most frequent.
However, the research emphasized that long-term cognitive and neuropsychiatric effects also occur post non-Covid-19 conditions such as pneumonia, heart attacks, and other severe diseases requiring ICU admission. The study underscores that the associations with brain health might not be exclusive to Covid-19 but rather linked to overall illness severity and hospitalization.
The researchers concluded that while post-Covid-19 brain health showed impairments, they were not significantly more pronounced than those observed in patients with non-Covid-19 conditions of similar disease severity. They stressed the importance of placing concerns regarding brain health after Covid-19 within the context of overall illness severity, highlighting the need for perspective when considering the long-term effects of severe diseases on brain health.
