The coronavirus pandemic has had a disastrous impact on the lives of people around the globe. Now, a recent study finding reveals that COVID-19 can cause difficulties in recognizing faces and navigating.
According to the researchers, some patients are exhibiting a condition known as prosopagnosia or face blindness. This is the first study to report such problems in patients who have recovered from COVID-19. The findings of the study were published in the journal Cortex.
The team of scientists examined a 28-year-old woman, who contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 and experienced a relapse two months later. According to the scientists, she began to notice difficulties with recognizing faces and navigation after the relapse.
The scientists found that she had trouble recognizing familiar faces, which is a symptom of prosopagnosia. She also had difficulty learning new identities, according to her scores on the Cambridge Face Memory Test.
During the study, the researchers also found that the woman had navigational deficits and had difficulty remembering where things were in the grocery store.
As a part of the study, the scientists obtained self-reported data from 54 individuals who had long COVID with symptoms for 12 weeks or more, and 32 persons who had fully recovered from COVID-19.
According to the scientists, most participants with long covid reported that their cognitive and perpetual abilities had decreased since they had COVID-19.
Dartmouth College neuropsychologists Marie-Luise Kieseler and Brad Duchaine presented Annie with a series of tests and confirmed that her trouble with recognition is due to specific face memory defects and not wider issues.