Truthspeak is right on Flat Earth...we are Saw Hei because we tio Covid

[k1976]

Your brain on SARS-CoV-2​

It’s clear by now that SARS-CoV-2 is not just a respiratory virus, but also one that can affect organs throughout the body—including the brain. Researchers are still learning about why that is, but leading hypotheses suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may cause persistent inflammation in the brain, damage to blood vessels in the brain, immune dysfunction so extreme it affects the brain, or perhaps a combination of all the above. Studies have even found that people’s brains can shrink after having COVID-19, a change potentially associated with cognitive issues.

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COVID-19 has been linked to serious cognitive problems, including dementia and suicidal thinking. And brain fog, a common symptom of Long COVID, can be so profound that people are unable to live the lives and work the jobs they once did. But COVID-19 also seems able to affect the brain in subtler ways. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared the cognitive performance of people who'd fully recovered from COVID-19 with that of a similar group of people who'd never had the virus. The COVID-19 group did worse, equivalent to a deficit of about three IQ points.

 

[k1976]

That’s not a dramatic difference. Our cognitive abilities naturally fluctuate a little from day to day—and in a July interview with TIME, study co-author Adam Hampshire, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at King’s College London, said a three-point IQ difference is “well within” the range of that normal fluctuation, so small that some people might not even notice it.

But could such a drop be enough to lead to, say, extra typos and absentmindedness? Maybe. In Hampshire’s study, people who’d had COVID-19 consistently performed worse on cognitive tests than people who hadn’t.

If the brain suffers “mild but ubiquitous” changes after an infection, Vibell says, those effects could feasibly “impact the brain, behavior, and social behavior in so many subtle, but maybe [cumulatively] quite bad, ways.”