'Brain Fog' After COVID-19: Many Mild Cases Leave Lasting Impact, Study Finds - KQED

“I'll go into the kitchen wanting to get something out of the refrigerator and I open a cabinet,” Wheeler says. “I forget what I'm there for and I’ve gone to the wrong place.”

He’ll watch a movie with his wife and the next morning, he can’t remember what he saw. Even in the moment he’s staring at Russell Crowe on screen, he can’t remember his name.

“And then there's another Australian actress that's in every movie? Do you know the most popular Australian actress?” Wheeler asks me during an interview.

"Nicole Kidman," I say.

“Nicole Kidman,” Wheeler confirms. “Whenever I see them or think of them, I just have a gap. Sometimes it’s very obvious things, sometimes it's somebody who's very important in my life, I just can't remember their name.”

Bruce Wheeler hikes in England in 2017. Since he got COVID-19 in March 2020, he's had a hard time walking long distances or up hills — but what really bothers him is what people are calling 'brain fog.' (Courtesy Dale Wheeler)

These kinds of persistent cognitive problems have so far been documented mainly among older people who had to be hospitalized for severe cases of COVID-19.

But Wheeler was never in the hospital.

A new study from UCSF researchers suggests brain fog may be more common among patients like Wheeler who had milder cases of COVID-19 and rode their illness out at home. Out of 100 patients tracked, 20 experienced cognitive issues and 14 of them had never been in the hospital.

“We looked at the demographics of these individuals — they were overwhelmingly young,” says Joanna Hellmuth, a cognitive neurologist at UCSF and lead author of the study. “They were in their late 30s, as an average age.”

This is problematic, she says, because most tools used to screen for cognitive issues were designed to detect dementia.

“We have a lot of limited ways that our society thinks about thinking and memory changes. It’s either dementia or it's nothing,” she says. “There's really no in between in these more subtle cognitive disorders that really aren't recognized as much in the medical field.”

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'Brain Fog' After COVID-19: Many Mild Cases Leave Lasting Impact, Study Finds - KQED
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