Patients with lingering effects from COVID-19 and who self-reported impaired attention, memory, multitasking abilities, word-finding difficulties, and fatigue, were found to have only minor impairments when given a battery of cognitive tests. A sub-group of patients who underwent 18F FDG PET scans were found to have no distinct pathology, ruling out possible alternative diagnoses for the reported behavior, according to a study published in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine .

Led authors Drs. Andrea Dressing and Tobias Bormann and their team wrote, “In patients (n=31) in the long-term phase after COVID-19 (202±58 days after positive PCR) with self-reported symptoms of Long COVID, an exhaustive neuropsychological test-battery revealed slight impairments only in individual cases, whereas fatigue was highly prevalent. Cerebral ¹⁸ F-FDG PET failed to reveal a distinct pathological signature in the subgroup of patients undergoing ¹⁸ F-FDG PET (n=14).”

“The findings deviate from previous reports in patients in the early subacute stage of COVID-19 and suggest that underlying causes of Long COVID might be related to fatigue but not to persistent cortical dysfunction,” concluded the team.

Sources:

Andrea Dressing, Tobias Bormann, Ganna Blazhenets, Nils Schroeter, Lea I Walter, Johannes Thurow, Dietrich August, Hanna Hilger, Katarina Stete, Kathrin Gerstacker, Susan Arndt, Alexander Rau, Horst Urbach, Siegbert Rieg, Dirk Wagner, Cornelius Weiller, Philipp T Meyer, Jonas A Hosp. Neuropsychological profiles and cerebral glucose metabolism in neurocognitive Long COVID-syndrome. Journal of Nuclear Medicine Oct 2021, jnumed.121.262677; DOI: 10.2967/jnumed.121.262677. Published online October 14, 2021, at https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/early/2021/10/14/jnumed.121.262677. Accessed November 2, 2021.

Morton, Will. Brain scans of patients with ‘long COVID-19’ appear normal. AuntMinnie.com October 20, 2021, at https://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=sup&sub=mol&pag=dis&ItemID=133806. Accessed November 2, 2021.