THAT FOG IN THE GREY CELLS
A Covid-negative report after a bout of the infection might seem like a moment to celebrate, but for many, it’s just the beginning of another ordeal. Two months after Aabha Malik tested negative, her life and work continue to be affected. “I put my pen down and two minutes later forget where I kept it. When others are speaking, I find it difficult to focus on the words. It feels like my brain is stuck,” says the 28-year-old IT research intern in Bengaluru. While her colleagues jokingly call her “noodle brain”, her doctor says she is suffering from mental fogginess—a condition often associated with cancer patients undertaking chemotherapy (commonly called chemobrain), where key cognitive functions such as attention and memory, besides emotions and sleep, get impacted.
“When the pandemic began,” says Dr M.V. Padma Srivastava, head of neurology and chief of the neurosciences centre at AIIMS, Delhi, “we assumed the symptoms would be primarily in the lungs. But now it is quite clear that the virus can affect almost any organ, including the brain. In India, we have seen a number of patients with brain fog.” According to a study published in the October 2021 issue of the journal , nearly one in four people who have had Covid in March 2022 showed that Covid patients—four and a half months after testing positive—had lost 0.2-2 per cent more grey matter than those who had not been infected. This was the first large study that had pre-Covid data to rely on and was able to prove what others had been merely hypothesising about since the pandemic began—the virus indeed causes brain damage and worsens pre-existing neurological problems.
