A comparative study shows that people with memory problems in the Netherlands deteriorated a lot faster during the measures against the corona pandemic than before.
There were concerns from the start: how do people with dementia respond to the corona measures? There were already plenty of indications of negative effects, but now a group of scientists at the Amsterdam Alzheimer Center has it too really picked. The conclusion: their patients’ memory deteriorated faster during the lockdowns than comparable patients before the pandemic hit.
The researchers used the standardized tests they have been doing for years in the Alzheimer Center of the Amsterdam UMC. An example is the fifteen-word task, a memory test in which people are told a list of words that they have to ‘return’ to the experimenter. By doing such tests regularly, the course of their symptoms over time is charted.
Memory loss continued
It enabled them to study the differences that occurred during the lockdowns. On the one hand, 113 patients who visited the memory clinic in the months before the first lockdown in the spring of 2020. Those people were compared with a group of patients who visited the center a few years earlier, and then achieved comparable scores. They then compared how the two groups fared a year after their first tests. So for the first group that was a lockdown year, for the second group it was not.
The difference was unequivocal. Both groups achieved a lower score on the second visit, the memory loss progressed. But the decline was stronger in the lockdown group than in the control group. And that effect was strongest for the people who had no dementia at the first visit.
“We see people who suffer from memory loss,” explains scientific director Wiesje van der Flier. “Some of them have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia, others have not. That’s the non-dementia group. They may later receive a diagnosis of dementia, but sometimes not at all. Then there is already brain damage, but they manage to live ‘around their brain damage’, as it were. We also know that this works better if people have a good social structure around them.”
Loss of structure
It is precisely there that things may have gone wrong during the lockdowns, the researchers suspect. “Our interpretation is that it is due to the corona measures,” says Van der Flier. “We know that the lockdown has had a major impact on social activities, structure, the range of care, stress and other stimuli. We think that a combination of those factors has allowed these people to sink through the ice faster, where the pre-lockdown group did better.”
The research is part of a larger study project into the consequences of the lockdowns for Alzheimer’s patients. Another study on patient mortality during the lockdowns is in the offing. The effect that the often delayed care has had on healthcare costs is also being investigated. “But we have already been able to answer many questions,” says Van der Flier. She therefore already has an advice ready for the following possible limitations: “Make sure that the care offer and the social network remain available in one way or another. That can help this group enormously.”
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2023-04-21 20:01:27
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