Scientists fr om Tomsk State University and the Research Institute of Mental Health at TNIMC are conducting a joint project, supported by the Russian National Foundation, to investigate cognitive and emotional disorders in individuals who have had COVID-19. The aim of the project is to determine the cognitive impairments caused by COVID-19 and how they are related to the reliability of connections between neurons in the brain. The study revealed that one of the effects of COVID-19 was depression, which is more prevalent in women, while short-term memory issues are more common in men. The results of the study were published in an article in the Journal of Clinical Medicine (Q1).
“The aim of our study was to assess cognitive function and brain changes in patients with clinically diagnosed depression after COVID-19 (post-COVID depression),” explained Mikhail Svetlik, the project leader and a scientist at the TSU Laboratory of Neurobiology. “The peculiarity of the study is that depression was not only self-reported by patients, but also diagnosed by specialists at the Research Institute of Mental Health at TNIMC. The data collected will provide a better understanding of the causes and consequences of depression caused by Covid-19.”
The study included 71 patients with post-COVID depression, as well as control groups of individuals who recovered from COVID-19 without complications and participants who did not contract the virus. There was also a group of patients in whom the coronavirus caused neurological complications without depression.
“The study revealed that women were more likely to develop post-COVID depression,” said Mikhail Svetlik. “However, in cases wh ere men did experience post-COVID depression, they showed more significant cognitive impairment. This was demonstrated using the Stroop task and Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test (MOCA), which assesses various functions such as attention, concentration, executive functions, memory, speech, numeracy, orientation, and others. In women, there were notable impairments in short-term memory, particularly in the immediate reproduction of words.”
The differences in symptoms between the two study groups during the post-COVID depression phase were highly significant. More than half of the patients with post-COVID depression reported experiencing insomnia (64%) and loss of taste (56%), while only 29% and 21% of participants in the group without depression reported these symptoms. Additionally, almost all patients in the post-COVID depression group reported fatigue and deficits in attention and memory, and were significantly more likely to experience myalgia and panic attacks.
The obtained results will enable personalized depression treatment based on the patient's gender and the severity of their previous COVID-19 illness.