The Covid pandemic may have impacted brain health in people in the UK aged 50 and over, according to a new study. More than 3,000 volunteers completed yearly questionnaires and online cognitive tests to measure changes in memory, and other faculties, as the pandemic unfolded. The results revealed a decline, irrespective of Covid infection.
Stress, loneliness and alcohol consumption may explain some of the findings, experts say. Coping with Covid fears, worries and uncertainties and disruption to routines may have had a “real, lasting impact” on brain health, they say.
From the study in the Lancet:
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant worsening of cognition in older adults, associated with changes in known dementia risk factors. The sustained decline in cognition highlights the need for public health interventions to mitigate the risk of dementia—particularly in people with mild cognitive impairment, in whom conversion to dementia within 5 years is a substantial risk. Long-term intervention for people with a history of COVID-19 should be considered to support cognitive health.
The study and reportage indicating diminished memory and cognitive capacities caused by social factors associated with isolation imposed by handling of the Covid pandemic, while true, are one-dimensional and not paramount.
A Yale study published in the same month has shown the Covid vaccine itself to have predated the social cause of this cognitive decline.
The study led by Dr. Harlan Krumholz of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine and Yilun Wu of the Yale School of Public Health’s Department of Biostatistics, clearly show how the clustering of the symptoms of diminished cognitive recall, brain fog and neuropathy, “began soon after COVID-19 vaccination and persisted in many people, indicating “a potential relationship.” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.09.23298266v1.full.pdf
There is a certain irony here in that historians who rely on memory have largely received the Covid vaccine, either owing to failure to do due diligence on the anomalous immune system compromising mRNA variant or having succumbed to unconscionable and unconstitutional academic vaccine mandates.
Dr. G. Heath King