A recent study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports found that people with all different types of dementia became worse quickly after they got COVID-19.
A new study has found that if someone already has dementia and gets infected with a virus called SARS-CoV-2, their mental function could get very bad quickly. This was true for all different types of dementia studied in the report.
Doctors have recognized the impact of COVID-19 on people’s brains and are referring to it as “brain fog”. To figure out more about it, a team of researchers looked into how this virus affects cognition in fourteen people who already had some kind of dementia—four with Alzheimer’s Disease, five with vascular dementia, three with Parkinson’s Disease Dementia, and two with Frontotemporal Dementia. They wanted to see if there was any further cognitive decline after being infected with COVID-19.
Two scientists, Souvik Dubey and Julián Benito-León, wondered if the coronavirus could make people with already existing dementia feel worse. But it made it hard to figure this out because there were a lot of outside things that can influence whether or not dementia is getting worse.
Scientists discovered that when people had COVID-19, their type of dementia became much stronger and progressed more quickly than before. They also found that it was harder to tell the difference between the different types of dementia after someone got COVID-19.
Dr. Ritwik Ghosh, a researcher from Burdwan Medical College and Hospital in India, is worried about classifying dementia since the Covid-19 pandemic. He says that it’s hard to identify dementia because some people who have been infected with the virus without having had dementia before show signs of it after infection. This can make it look like other types of dementia such as degenerative or vascular issues.
Researchers discovered that the signs of a certain kind of dementia changed after COVID-19. Dementias associated with both physical damage and decline started to look like mixed dementia in how it affected people–physically, mentally, and radiologically (through scans). People who had dementia which was slowly getting worse became deteriorated more quickly than before.
The changes that happened in the study were tracked for some time afterwards, and it was noticed that there was a decrease in the size of certain parts of the brain. Also, it seemed something like an issue with blood vessels and inflammation had a connection to these changes in the brain’s white matter intensity.
Dementia can get worse quickly and also cause even more problems with your thinking. White spots in your brain might start to show up. This makes it harder for your brain to protect itself from getting hurt again, like if you catch an infection or have a bad reaction to something.
Dr. Souvik Dubey and his team are suggesting a new term – ‘FADE-IN MEMORY’ – to describe the exhaustion, difficulty with being fluent in conversation, a lack of focus, depression, difficulties with problem solving activities and the slow processing speed of information along with memory impairments post-COVID-19.
Mahua Jana Dubey, who works at a mental hospital in West Bengal, India said that when people have COVID-19, they can have difficulty thinking and it might also show up in feeling tired and depressed. Taking care of them can be tough too and this is something that should not be forgotten when it comes to treatment.
As more people are getting older and are being affected by dementia, we really need to find new ways to recognize if someone’s cognitive problems have been caused by COVID-19. This will be very important for researching dementia in the future, according to Dr. Souvik Dubey.
George Perry, an editor and professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio said that studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) are more likely to get COVID-19 and the virus has a greater effect on people who already have memory problems. He added that whether the memory loss is caused by other issues or COVID-19 itself, the virus will make it worse.
The February 2023 study “The Effects of SARS-CoV-2 Infection on the Cognitive Functioning of Patients with Pre-Existing Dementia” looked at how coronavirus affects people who already have dementia. It was conducted by 11 doctors and published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports with a DOI of 10.3233/ADR-220090.
