United Kingdom: A news study has found that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused sustained damage to the brain health of people aged 50 or over, accelerating cognitive decline regardless of whether they contracted the disease or not.
The study noted that cognitive function and working memory in older adults declined more quickly during the first year of the pandemic between March 2020 and February 2021.
“The acceleration in cognitive decline has been exacerbated by a number of factors since the arrival of COVID,” the researchers noted. These factors comprise increased loneliness and depression, reduced exercise, and higher alcohol consumption, as well as the effects of the disease itself.
The study, published in the Lancet Healthy Longevity journal, was led by the University of Exeter and King’s College London.
Ms. Anne Corbett, a professor in dementia research and the lead at Exeter for the Protect study, commented that “our findings suggest that lockdowns and other restrictions we experienced during the pandemic have had a real lasting impact on brain health in people aged 50 or over, even after the lockdowns ended. This raises the important question of whether people are at a potentially higher risk of cognitive decline, which can lead to dementia.”
“It is now more important than ever to make sure we are supporting people with early cognitive decline, especially because there are things they can do to reduce their risk of dementia later on. ” She advised people concerned about their memory to see their GP,” Ms. Corbett added.
The research team analysed brain function tests from 3,142 people based in the UK, all aged between 50 and 90. Tests assessed participants’ short-term memory and their ability to complete complex tasks.
The study then looked at all the data collected over the year from March 2019 to February 2020 and compared it with the results from the pandemic’s first year (March 2020 to February 2021) and second year (March 2021 to February 2022).
The results found that the rate of cognitive decline increased in the first year of the pandemic and was higher among those who had already shown signs of mild cognitive decline before COVID-19 began.
“We found that people aged 50 years and older in the UK had an accelerated decline in executive function and working memory during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the UK was subjected to three societal lockdowns for a total period of six months,” the study remarked.
“Notably, however, this worsening in working memory persisted in the second year of the pandemic, after the social restrictions had eased. The scale of change is also of note, with all groups—the whole cohort and the individual subgroups—showing more than a 50 percent greater decline in working memory and executive function.”
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