Brain fog in COVID-19 patients can persist for months, even in those who were not hospitalized, study finds - KSL.com

The research, published Friday in the journal JAMA Network Open, found that nearly a quarter of COVID-19 patients in a Mount Sinai Health System registry experienced some issues with their memory — and although hospitalized patients were more likely to have such brain fog after a coronavirus infection, some outpatients had cognitive impairment too.

Among all the patients, the researchers found that 15% showed deficits in phonemic fluency in their speaking; 16% in a set of mental skills called their executive functioning; 18% showed deficits in their cognitive processing speed; 20% in their ability to process categories or lists; 23% in memory recall and 24% in memory encoding, among other impairments.

The researchers noted that hospitalized patients were more likely to have impairments in attention, executive functioning, category fluency and memory.

For instance, when it came to memory recall, the researchers found 39% of hospitalized patients had impairment in that area compared with 12% of outpatients.