When Annie reunited with her family for the first time a few months after contracting COVID-19, it was clear that the disease had not gone unnoticed.
“My father’s voice came from the stranger’s face,” Annie told investigators examining her case. Annie was able to recognize faces normally until she was diagnosed with COVID-19 in March 2020. A few days later she started to improve, but relapsed a few months later. His case now shows that we can add “face blindness” (prosopagnosia) to the long and growing list of brain problems caused by the disease.
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The new study interviewed more than 50 long-term COVID patients, many of whom had difficulty recognizing familiar faces after their infection.
“Faces are like water in my head,” Annie explained, saying that trying to remember a face right now is like asking you to reconstruct a Chinese character after watching it once, even though you’re not familiar with the language.
Previously, the 28-year-old part-time artist had to look at his subject every 15 to 30 minutes while working on a portrait. Now Annie has to constantly return to him.
Dartmouth College neuropsychologists Marie-Louise Kieseler and Brad Duchaine put Annie through a series of tests and confirmed that her recognition problems were more related to specific memory defects for faces rather than broader problems.
But Annie also had trouble navigating in familiar surroundings, had trouble finding her direction and had to rely on Google Maps to move her vehicle. Difficulties with navigating are common among others with prosopagnosia.
“The combination of prosopagnosia and navigational disorders that Annie brought to our attention is because the two often go hand in hand when a person has brain damage or developmental disabilities,” Dushaine explains. The common manifestation is probably due to the interconnectedness of these two abilities. In adjacent areas of the brain in the temporal lobe.
During the infection, Annie lost her sense of smell and taste, had difficulty breathing, and suffered from a high fever for several days. After the relapse, facial recognition and navigation problems were accompanied by other long-term COVID symptoms such as fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and brain fog. He later developed balance problems and migraines.
Due to insurance issues, Annie did not have an MRI.
“Therefore, stroke cannot be ruled out as the cause of its symptoms, especially given the evidence of an increased risk of stroke with COVID-19,” the team warns in their study.
Whatever the specific mechanism by which symptoms occur, this is another example of how COVID-19 can cause neurological problems.
“Our work highlights the perceptual problems with facial recognition and navigation that COVID-19 can cause – this is something people, especially doctors and other healthcare professionals, need to be aware of,” Duchain insists.
Most of the people with long-term COVID that the researchers studied reported significant neurological difficulties doing things that used to be easy for them.
“It’s known that there are broad cognitive issues that can be caused by COVID-19, but here we see serious and very selective problems in Annie,” Dushaine says. and selective post-COVID breaches.”
Previously Focus Wrote about virus protection. Scientists have told how long immunity lasts after an illness.
Source: Focus
Ashley Fitzgerald is an accomplished journalist in the field of technology. She currently works as a writer at 24 news breaker. With a deep understanding of the latest technology developments, Ashley’s writing provides readers with insightful analysis and unique perspectives on the industry.