COVID-19 can impact the risk of developing a host of neurological disorders. While long COVID’s impact on people is still being critically studied, new research found that the virus may increase the risk of developing memory problems and even Alzheimer’s in the year after initial infection.
“It’s really sobering,” says epidemiologist and researcher on the study Ziyad Al-Aly in an interview with WBUR. “COVID-19 is really not as benign as some people think it is.” The study, conducted by researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care system using the health care database from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, was published in the journal Nature Medicine last month and studied roughly 150,000 people with COVID-19 in comparison to about 11 million people without COVID-19.
In the first year following COVID-19 infection, people had a risk of developing 44 neurological brain disorders beyond brain fog. Some of the conditions Al-Aly noted in the interview were seizures, headaches, anxiety, depression, and Alzheimer’s, and if you’ve had COVID-19 you’re 42% more likely to have other neurological issues the year after initial infection, according to the study. COVID-19 can increase inflammation in the brain and lead to the development of these disorders, he says.