Cognitive symptoms, commonly referred to as brain fog, are among the most common persistent or new symptoms after COVID-19 in both people who have been hospitalized and those who have not. Brain fog may include deficits in spatial planning, working memory and executive functioning, difficulty with word retrieval and fluency, and poor attention. These symptoms, along with others that begin, persist, or recur after the initial illness with COVID-19, are called post-COVID conditions (or long COVID).
Cognitive symptoms are also often reported by patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Successful management tools used to treat ME/CFS can also be effective in treating long COVID. Any prescribed pharmaceutical or nonpharmaceutical intervention to treat long COVID should be done on a case-by-case basis while considering all individual patient factors, such as other comorbid conditions, current pharmaceutical regimens, and sociodemographic factors.
Here are five things to know about using ME/CFS symptom management tools to help with brain fog in long COVID:
1. Cognitive symptoms, commonly referred to as brain fog, occur in people who had COVID-19, no matter how severe their infection was.
In a systematic review of 81 studies, about one fifth of the individuals exhibited cognitive impairment for 12 or more weeks after their COVID-19 diagnosis. This result was similar for both hospitalized and nonhospitalized populations.[1]This study also noted that for some susceptible individuals, fatigue and cognitive impairment appeared to persist or become even worsen over time compared with their other persistent symptoms after COVID-19.
