Intelligence is what differentiates us from animals. We cannot live without informing ourselves, searching for answers, or building concepts and ideas. We as humans can anticipate what can happen in the future, and so on. What would we do without our intelligence?
PsyPost brings some concerning news. The publication raises awareness about a new COVID study. It seems that those who recovered from the virus tend to score significantly lower at an intelligence test by comparison with those who didn’t get infected.
Patients with more severe COVID illness could be more susceptible to cognitive decline
The new findings suggest that the coronavirus can produce significant reductions when it comes to cognitive ability. This could be especially true for those who had to deal with more severe COVID illness.
Adam Hampshire, who is a lead researcher and also an associate professor at Imperial College London, declared as quoted by PsyPost:
The test comprised a set of tasks designed to measure different dimensions of cognitive ability that had been designed for application in both citizen science and clinical research. A number of my colleagues contacted me in parallel to point out that this provided an opportunity to gather important data on how the pandemic and COVID-19 illness were affecting mental health and cognition.
The study was pretty large. It involved analyzing data from 81,337 participants. They completed intelligent tests from January 2020 to December of the same year. Twelve thousand six hundred eighty-nine of these individuals revealed that they’ve been infected with COVID and had to deal with different degrees of respiratory severity.
Hampshire also declared for PsyPost:
We need to be careful as it looks like the virus could be affecting our cognition. We do not fully understand how, why, or for how long, but we urgently need to find out. In the meantime, don’t take unnecessary risks and do get vaccinated.
The new research was published in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine.
