Brain fog is not like a hangover or depression. This is an executive dysfunction that makes basic cognitive tasks extremely difficult. When brain fog is severe, it can affect every aspect of a patient’s life. While other Long COVID symptoms have come and gone, the fog in her head has never really cleared.
Of the many possible symptoms of Long COVID, long covid brain fog is by far one of the most disabling and devastating. It is also the most misunderstood. When the coronavirus pandemic first started, it wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms. But 20 to 30 percent of patients report developing brain fog three months after their initial infection, and it can afflict those who are never sick enough to need a ventilator or any hospital care.
Brain fog goes deeper than the jumbled thinking that comes with a hangover, stress, or fatigue. It is not a psychosomatic disease and involves real changes in brain structure and chemistry. It’s not a mood disorder, and if anyone says it’s due to depression and anxiety, they’re unfounded, and the data suggests it might be the other way around.
Despite the vague name, brain fog is not an umbrella term for all possible mental problems. At its core is almost always a disorder of “executive function,” a collection of mental abilities that includes focusing, retaining information, and blocking distractions. These skills are so fundamental that when they collapse, most of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses. Anything that involves focus, multitasking, and planning.
How To Get Rid Of Long Covid-19 Brain Fog? explains brain fog in more detail. Almost anything that matters is going to be incredibly daunting. It elevates an unconscious process in a healthy person to the level of conscious decision-making. Memory is also affected, but differently than in degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The memory is there, but due to malfunctioning executive functions, the brain neither selects the important things to store nor efficiently retrieves this information.
Most people with brain fog are not that severe and get better over time. But even when people recover to the point where they can work, they may struggle with less flexible minds than they once did.
The long brain fog makes the condition sound like a temporary inconvenience and deprives patients of the legitimacy bestowed on more medical terms like cognitive impairment. The disability community has used the term for decades, and there are many other reasons behind the dismissal of brain fog beside the term.
Almost all infrastructure and teaching” is focused on degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, in which rogue proteins affect the brains of older adults. Few researchers know that viruses can cause cognitive impairment in young people, so Their effects are rarely studied.” As a result, no one learns about it in medical school.
We also don’t have a tool in place to measure brain fog, doctors often use the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is designed to detect extreme mental problems in older adults with dementia, and “has not been validated on anyone under the age of 55, even though Yes, people with severe brain fog can do it. More sophisticated tests exist, but they still compare people to population averages rather than their previous baseline. A high functioning person with declining abilities but within normal limits is told they have no problem.
This pattern is present in many chronic COVID symptoms: Doctors order inappropriate or oversimplified tests, whose negative results are used to discredit patients’ true symptoms. It doesn’t help that brain fog disproportionately affects women, who have long been labeled emotional or hysterical by the medical establishment. If you are affected by brain fog, you can consult a professional institution such as LongCovidCareCenter for symptomatic treatment.
