Neuropsychological Measures of Long COVID-19 Fog in Older Subjects

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 is known to impact older people more severely and to cause persistent symptoms during the recovery phase, including cognitive and neurologic ones. We investigated the cognitive and neurologic features of 100 elderly patients with confirmed diagnosis of coronavirus disease 2019 evaluated in the postacute phase through a direct neuropsychological evaluation consisting on Mini Mental State Examination and 8 neuropsychological tests. Overall, a total of 33 participants were found to perform at a level considered to be pathologic; more specifically, 33%, 23%, and 20% failed on Trial Making, Digit Span Backwards, and Frontal Evaluation Battery tests, respectively.

Keywords: Cognitive impairment; Elderly; Long COVID.

Fig. 1

Neurologic symptoms reported in the acute and recovery phase.

Fig. 2

Neuropsychological tests. The figure shows, for each neuropsychological test, the proportion of patients with fair (light color), borderline (darker color) or failed (dark color) outcome. Equivalent scores (ES) were used to rate participants: those with a score of 2 or more, 1, or zero were classified as having normal, borderline or pathologic performance respectively. Horizontal dashed line indicates the overall prevalence of participants classified as having a pathologic neuropsychological test (ie, ≥1 ES of zero and ≥1 ES of 1) MFTC, Multiple Features Target Cancellation test.