Potential New Marker for Assessing Long Covid and Cognitive Slowing

January 29, 2024

A study published last week found that Long COVID patients exhibit pronounced cognitive slowing, particularly in simple reaction time tasks, compared to both recovered COVID patients and those who never had COVID. This cognitive deficit was significant, with long COVID patients responding about three standard deviations slower than healthy controls.

The study, conducted by Sijia Zhao and colleagues at the University of Oxford, suggests that cognitive slowing may be an objective marker for tracking the progress of Long COVID rehabilitation and can conveniently be easily measured using a 30-second web-based task. The research also revealed that cognitive slowing persisted even when comparing Long COVID patients to those who had COVID but did not develop long-term symptoms, indicating it’s not solely due to the acute phase of the illness.

Citation for report:

Zhao, S., Martin, E. M., Reuken, P. A., Scholcz, A., Ganse-Dumrath, A., Srowig, A., Utech, I., Kozik, V., Radscheidt, M., Brodoehl, S., Stallmach, A., Schwab, M., Fraser, E., Finke, K., & Husain, M. (2024). Long COVID is associated with severe cognitive slowing: a multicentre cross-sectional study. EClinicalMedicine, 68, 102434. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102434