Many COVID-19 long-distance carriers report brain fog and insomnia after six months

• About 1 in 5 long-haul coronaviruses still experienced brain fog six months after their initial infection.
• That’s according to a new pre-printed analysis that collected data from nearly 19,000 patients.
• Doctors will have to continue to follow the long haul to find out if they have neurological conditions.
• See more stories on the Insider business page.

When people started reporting brain fog, lightheadedness and vertigo from COVID-19 infections, doctors weren’t sure how long the problems would last. Were these symptoms the short-term byproducts of a viral illness or the first signs of a neurological disorder?

Now, researchers are getting closer to an answer.

A new pre-print scan, which is still pending peer review, found that one in five long-haul coronaviruses – people with COVID-19 for about three weeks or more – have suffered a cognitive impairment at least six months after their initial infection. . For many patients, this brain fog has resulted in memory loss or difficulty concentrating or making decisions. In some cases, patients have had to take time off work or even declare unemployment.

“Neuropsychiatric symptoms appear to be a large part of the syndromes experienced by some people who survive COVID-19,” Alasdair Rooney, co-author of the analysis, told Insider.

Rooney’s research brought together nearly 19,000 adult patients in 51 studies, making it one of the largest reviews of long-haul neurological symptoms to date. The trends were the same whether the participants were hospitalized or not and regardless of the severity of their illness at onset.

But without knowing how long these symptoms last, doctors cannot yet classify them as neurological disorders or even chronic illnesses. The datasets are complicated by the fact that different studies follow long-haul carriers over varying periods of time and from different starting points.

“Before you even get to the point of setting thresholds or a certain number of weeks after which you report chronic disease, you need to have agreements on where you start measuring,” Rooney said. “And in the studies we looked at, there aren’t any at this time.”

Nonetheless, some evidence points to a potential link between COVID-19 and persistent neurological problems: A recent study found that 72% of coronavirus survivors who were diagnosed with disorders or brain damage had first received these diagnoses in six months after their COVID-19 infection.

Insomnia and fatigue can also be neurological problems

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One of the challenges of diagnosing long-term symptoms of COVID-19 is that doctors are always learning the underlying mechanisms of the virus itself. For example, researchers haven’t understood why some long-haul people develop fatigue, while others have chest pain or difficulty breathing.

“It’s almost like long haul, there’s this whole bunch of symptoms and they put their hand in and take out a handful of it,” said Noah Greenspan, a physiotherapist who runs a pulmonary rehabilitation center in New York City. “For some people it can be the gut. Some people it can be the autonomic nervous system. Some people it can be the lungs.”

In addition to brain fog, 27% of long-haul coronaviruses in Rooney’s analysis reported insomnia and 24% fatigue. Rooney said both symptoms may be rooted in neurological issues, but that’s not the only possible cause.

“The reason we included fatigue was that we see it very often in the neuropsychiatric clinic,” he said. “It is well recognized that in some people fatigue has a physical cause and others describe mental fatigue. And we do not yet know what it is.”

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About 19% of coronavirus patients in the analysis also reported anxiety, while 15% reported post-traumatic stress disorder. Rooney said it was unclear whether these issues were direct symptoms of COVID-19, just related to the pandemic in general, or something else. But patients should take any lingering neurological or psychiatric problems seriously, he added.

“I would always advise them, if they were concerned about this, to seek advice – in other words, to be cautious and not to minimize it,” Rooney said.

Future studies should also take into account the severity of these symptoms, he added, as brain fog can change one person’s life but simply embarrass another.

“What we need now is essentially a lot more research into these particular problems to understand: what are the limits of these symptoms?” Rooney said. “Are they functionally disabling or are they symptoms that people can live with?”