Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from Covid-19

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29 pointsCharlesW25 comments

Nope.

These are deficits and not declines. Which is problematic because people that get more severe Covid also tend to be obese, older, and have preexisting conditions. These are clear confounders which haven't been controlled for in this study. These confounders are all correlated with lower IQ as well as Covid severity.

There's good evidence for long Covid, but this isn't it.

>People who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness, depression and anxiety.

Maybe obesity isn't controlled for.

"Regression of the same linear model with respiratory severity as the predictor indicated that people who were ill would on average be expected to have marginally higher as opposed to lower cognitive performance."

Doesn't this show no effect after controlling for confounders?

I was just pointing out an obvious contradiction. I don't really have a clue. Maybe somebody else can elucidate.

I found another source for the paper (via its DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.101044) because the page did not work too well here:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... (Open Access!)

One line summary: .47SD decrease in IQ; higher than a stroke. Equivalent to 7 IQ points.

Only for the people on ventilators, and that number isn't controlling for confounders

There have been a few discussions / articles here on HN about how Covid-19 may also have some role in the formation of Lewy bodies. To me, this is one of the more scary potential pathways for this observed cognitive deficit. Will otherwise healthy people clear the Lewy bodies over time? Or will we have a long-term uptick in conditions like Parkinsons or other Lewy body dementias?

I'm not downplaying covid at all, but I'm beginning to wonder about the impact of any illness on our longevity.

Immune recruitment and inflammation is not healthy.

Endothelial and organ damage is not healthy.

I wonder if every cold we get reduces our lifespan by some quantifiable number of days. Perhaps correlating with severity and tissues / immune pathways impacted

> Immune recruitment and inflammation is not healthy.

Try to live without it. It’s arguably the “healthiest” thing our bodies do.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. The immune response inflicts damage that the body must repair. It's not free.

When you hear about chronic inflammation, that's not a healthy state.

We evolved an immune system because the alternative is vastly inferior. Immunocompromised individuals have a much harder time surviving (pathogens, cancers, etc.), especially without the aid of modern medicine. SCID is a disease where you can see the full ramifications.

What I'm saying is that the immune response itself is like fighting a war. Sometimes a war leaves scars that last. Over the course of a lifetime, these add up.

I think you would have heard about a lot more “cold-fog” if that was the case for cognitive issues. I am sure it does happen—covid and the common cold are both coronaviruses after all, but I’ve been hearing numbers as high as 30% with covid:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-does-...

With that said, I am sure if we poured this much research into other severe illnesses we would find out a lot more bad news about what they do to our bodies…

My understanding is there are measurable effects on average in each category of 'intelligence' no matter the severity of the symptoms. The effects are significant in that they are statistically significant, but in some cases are quite minor. I'm interested to see how things change over time.

See the other comment thread about https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

-7 IQ points is not terrible, but not insignificant.

-7 is the reference for .47 std deviations but those who managed at home without respitory symptoms had much less than that (.02 std Dev). See fig two which has been replicated in basically every paper I've read on this.

If (big if) the severity of symptoms of covid is associated with immune response from it being a novel pathogen, then the long term outlook isn't so bad as long as everyone gets vaccinated. That's my hope at least. Otherwise we're stuck living forever with a disease that is extremely contagious and extremely feared.

Original thread from a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27939481

Some of this effect may be explained by the positive link between intelligence and social distancing: https://www.fastcompany.com/90527258/people-who-social-dista...

It's not a very good study, i made a Twitter thread om why: https://twitter.com/TheAntsSleep/status/1420313386252972045?...

The implications of this will be interesting a decade or two from now when all these long term consequences and costs add up

Feels like vaccine propaganda to me. There are literally billions of people who had covid and recovered fully.

There are millions who recovered from a car crash. Are studies of those who sustained injury all propaganda of insurance companies?

How do you know it's not the brain fog telling you everything's going to be ok?

too early to say. there's a spike in cardiovascular disease, on the order of 20x since the pandemic. the commonality is prior covid infection.

Do you have a source for that? Actually interested in reading into this.

i can't seem to find it in my notes right now. i came across the study when looking into the increase of kawasaki syndrome post "asymptomatic" covid infections in children last year. i do have this paper in my notes that speaks of a 30 fold increase in kawasaki diagnoses: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0959-4

since then, we now call this post-covid complication MIS-C and there's increasing coverage and study into it. i do recall coming across another study looking at a more broad range of age groups and noting a 20 fold increase of cardiovascular diagnoses.

overall, we still have a lot to learn about this virus.

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