Chicago, US: People with COVID-19 are more likely to develop brain injuries a year later compared to people who have never been infected with the coronavirus, US researchers reported.

The yearlong study, published in Nature Medicine, assessed brain health across 44 different disorders using medical records without patient identifiers from millions of US veterans.

Brain and other neurological disorders were 7 percentages more common in those infected with COVID than in a similar group of veterans who had never been infected. That translates to about 6.6 million Americans who had brain disorders related to their COVID infection, the team shared.

“The results show the devastating long term effects of COVID-19,” senior author Dr. Ziyad Al-Ali of Washington University School of Medicine Quoted in a statement.

Mr. Al-Ali and colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System studied the medical records of 154,000 US veterans who tested positive for COVID between March 1, 2020, and January 15, 2021.

Memory impairments, commonly referred to as brain fog, were the most common symptom. Compared to control groups, people affected by COVID were 77 percentages more likely to have memory problems.

People infected with the virus were 50 percent more likely to have an ischemic stroke caused by a blood clot compared to the never-infected group.

People with COVID are 80 percent more likely to have seizures, 43 percent more likely to have mental health problems such as anxiety or depression, 35 percent more likely to have headaches and 42 percent more likely to have movement disorders such as tremors compared to control groups.

According to the experts, governments and healthcare institutions must prepare for a post COVID era.

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