Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 have impaired brain function and were found to perform worse on cognitive, psychiatric and neurological tests overall, according to a study published Dec. 28 in JAMA.
For the study, researchers included 345 patients who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 between March 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021. They compared the brain function of those patients across several tests against a control group of individuals who had been hospitalized with other conditions including pneumonia, heart attacks and other non-COVID infections of comparable severity.
Across the board, COVID-19 patients performed worse in all test categories.
"Patients with COVID-19 also performed worse than healthy controls during all other psychiatric and neurological assessments," researchers wrote.
However, the authors note that although brain function was impaired, overall brain health was "not more impaired than among hospitalized control patients."