Hi, I’m straight arrow news expert. Dr. Payal Kohli.

And today we’re talking about brain fog. Let’s start by asking, is brain fog real? And if so, what is it?

Brain fog is definitely real. And it is exactly how it sounds, and inability to concentrate to think clearly memory problems, cognitive problems, difficulty conducting your tasks, fatigue, depression. All of these are phenomena that qualifies brain fog, essentially feeling like you’re in a bit of a fog all the time. And you can absolutely see it after COVID.

So you may be asking, what is the relationship with COVID? Well, we’re finding out that COVID is not just a respiratory virus, but it can infect many other organ systems, and one of them potentially being the brain and the central nervous system, what we’re seeing is that people are more likely to have brain fog, after they recover from COVID, even after the symptoms of COVID have completely resolved. Now, of course, this is most extreme in the people who got very sick with COVID, they ended up in the hospital. But we can also see it in people who had milder cases of COVID, or people who had very few or minimal symptoms, if any, at all. And we don’t quite understand why it happens after COVID. There is evidence that tells us that people who have had COVID and recovered may have some brain atrophy or shrinking of the brain tissue itself. And we again, don’t know what the long term implications are for these individuals, whether this might progress to something more concerning, like dementia. Now, of course, we want to know what the implications are, because that’s how we would initiate treatment, and potentially reverse some of these changes.