People, who perceived that they had cognitive difficulties such as memory problems during the pandemic, were more likely to have lingering physical manifestations of the disease than people who did not report cognitive issues, new research has revealed.
More than one in three people experiencing long Covid symptoms perceived such cognitive deficits, which have been found to be related to anxiety and depression.
The research from University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) indicates that psychological issues such as anxiety or depressive disorders may play a part in some people who are experiencing long Covid.
“This perception of cognitive deficits suggests that affective issues — in this case anxiety and depression — appear to carry over into the long Covid period,” said senior author Dr Neil Wenger, professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
“This is not to say that long Covid is all in one’s head, but that it is likely not a single condition and that for some proportion of patients, there is likely a component of anxiety or depression that is exacerbated by the disease,” he added in the study published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Long Covid is described as experiencing persistent symptoms of the disease more than four weeks after initial infection.
The researchers surveyed 766 patients enrolled in UCLA’s SARS-CoV-2 Ambulatory Programme who had confirmed symptomatic Covid infection.
The researchers found that 276 (36.1 per cent) of the patients surveyed perceived during the acute illness or the following weeks that they had cognitive difficulties.
In addition, these patients were twice as likely as those without perceived cognitive deficits to report also experiencing physical symptoms at 60 and 90 days.
The findings “may help us disentangle the complex construct that is post-Covid-19 condition, or PCC,” the researchers wrote. “These findings suggest a substantial psychological component for long lasting SARS-CoV-2 symptoms for at least some patients.”
