A study published in the journal Cortex suggests that having long Covid can cause prosopagnosia, a type of face blindness that makes it difficult to identify faces, including those close to you.
To reach their conclusion, researchers from the University of Dartmouth, in the United States, relied on the case of a 28-year-old woman named Annie. The volunteer did not have other information disclosed, such as last name and where she lives.
She contracted the coronavirus in March 2020 and, even after months, when she was already cured, Annie still had difficulties recognizing her father’s face, claiming that he looked like a stranger. The young woman was asked to participate in several tests, including a celebrity recognition exercise.
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According to researchers, the woman noticed the unusual symptom for the first time in June of that year. She reported to researchers that, during a family dinner, she was unable to distinguish her father’s face from her uncle’s.
In addition, she found it difficult to perform other day-to-day tasks that she normally performed before, such as finding her car in a parking lot and drawing faces that she had in her memory. Researcher Brad Duchaine, leader of the study, pointed out that Annie had no previous cognitive impairment.
Facial recognition tests
The temporal lobe is the second largest area of the brain. He is responsible for recognizing objects, storing memories and memories, understanding language and processing emotional reactions.
In order to check whether prosopagnosia was occurring because of damage to the central lobes, the researchers put Annie through a series of tests. First, she needed to identify the faces of some celebrities. Of 60 celebrities featured, she recognized 48. However, when presented alone, she recognized only 28% of the figures.
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In another test, when researchers showed a photograph of a celebrity she claimed to know and then a double of that same person, she was only able to correctly identify who the celebrity was 67% of the time. Typically, a person scores 87% on this type of test.
Despite the low score on facial recognition tests, the woman performed well on other exercises, such as scene and voice recognition.
After Annie, researchers analyzed data from more than 54 people who had long-term Covid and either had the same symptoms as Annie or reported that their cognitive abilities had declined.
“One of the challenges reported by many respondents was the difficulty of visualizing family and friends, something we often hear from prosopagnostics,” commented Duchaine.
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