The latest studies suggest that 43 percent of people who have passed the COVID-19 suffer from what is known as ‘clouded brain’; a profile that is “very hidden” in this infection because, “in the beginning, no difficulty is observed”.
losses of memorydifficulty of concentration, clumsiness mental illness and problems with maintaining attention: “A fatigue that others would have had when they worked twelve hours”. These are the consequences of the virus that has affected the central nervous system and the brain.
The professor of the Master in Clinical Neuropsychology at the International University of La Rioja (LINK) Aarón Fernández del Olmo specified that these are people who, after passing on the infection, claim that they no longer process information in the same way. This is something that is also identified with patients who have suffered from other viruses.
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In an interview with Europa Press, Fernandez dell’Olmo He explained that if there is a significant brain injury, you can be very clear about the cause, the loss of function, and the whole circuit that exists to compensate.
It is something that would happen, for example, when suffering from a stroke (something that can cause Covid virus as well, as it has a vascular component).
In this case, the stroke can cause, for example, a difficulty in language or memory, which is very evident from neuroimaging.
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However, there is also a a profile that remains “very hidden” after passing Covid “because, at first, there is no difficulty”. Therefore, “the problem arises when the person begins to accumulate time, maintaining attention, working on tasks that have more stimuli and begins to generate fatigue,” she explained.
It is a fatigue that, in another person, would be generated by working twelve hours, but which can happen to these people “in a very short time and according to the stimuli that are presented to them”.
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“That cognitive control in the face of disturbing stimuli, such as noise, which must be processed very quickly, as society demands of us today, they become saturated very quickly; and there you have a great deal of difficulty carrying out daily tasks, “she said.
It is something that “obviously it is frustrating“because it didn’t happen to them before and then it’s difficult to assimilate it.
We speak of “mental fog” when we refer to this set of signs that do not allow us to function quickly and so on “they saturate us”.
But “we will find many different causes”. Therefore, the “ideal” is that there is a neuropsychological evaluation behind that allows us to discern if we are really facing a problem deriving from Covid or from another situation, given that there are people who “believe” that they have had Covid.
From here it is necessary to propose, as reported by this expert, a double way of working with the areas that are not working, through exercises that help to strengthen these areas that are affected.
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On the other hand, set strategies to compensate: “Something that didn’t happen to us before, like working with the TV on, now saturates us more, so we have to look for spaces with less stimuli, or more spaces between one activity and another”.
Fernández del Olmo warned that “we are in the field of lack of studies to see the effects therapy“It is clear that cognitive stimulation is usually very useful in stopping the progressive effects of degenerative diseases and, itself, could be extrapolated to the difficulties faced with mental fog.
“The guideline would be to diagnose it correctly through an asset neuropsychological evaluation and, subsequently, to carry out a rehabilitation treatment so that the person is as functional as possible in his daily life “, he explained.
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Age affects why an older person’s brain is less connected and this “has a big influence on processing speed”.
When we have that mental fog, what happens is “those connections break off a bit and I don’t process that fast”; therefore, for an elderly person this situation will be “more complicated because we already start from a brain with less connectivity”.
