Caretakers of patients with dementia, beware. A study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports has cautioned that infection with Sars-Cov-2 adds to the agony of the people suffering with the neurodegenerative conditions.  

Lead investigators Souvik Dubey, from the Department of Neuromedicine, Bangur Institute of Neurosciences (BIN), Kolkata, West Bengal, and Julián Benito-León, from the Department of Neurology, University Hospital "12 de Octubre," Madrid, Spain, explained: "We speculated there must have been some deleterious effect of Covid-19 in patients with preexisting dementia extrapolating our understanding from the cognitive impact of this viral infection in patients without dementia. However, post-Covid-19 evaluation of cognitive impairments in patients with preexisting dementia is difficult due to multiple confounders and biases."

Dubey further said that "as the ageing population and dementia are increasing globally, we believe pattern recognition of Covid-19-associated cognitive deficits is urgently needed to distinguish between Covid-19-associated cognitive impairments per se and other types of dementia."

In addition to finding that all subtypes of dementia, irrespective of patients’ previous dementia types, behaved like rapidly progressive dementia following COVID-19, the team of investigators found that the line of demarcation between different types of dementia became remarkably blurry post-Covid-19.

Co-investigator Ritwik Ghosh, Department of General Medicine, Burdwan Medical College and Hospital, Burdwan, West Bengal, India, expressed his concern about dementia subtyping. "It is more difficult in the post-Covid-19 era, where the history of this viral infection plays the most important role. Few patients with a history of Covid-19 without preexisting dementia have phenotypically and imaging-wise similar brain changes mimicking other degenerative and vascular dementias."

Researchers also found that the characteristics of a particular type of dementia changed following Covid-19, and both degenerative and vascular dementia started behaving like mixed dementia both clinically and radiologically. A rapidly and aggressively deteriorating course was observed in patients having insidious onset, slowly progressive dementia, and who were previously cognitively stable. According to studies, the estimated dementia prevalence for adults ages 60 plus in India is 7.4%. About 8.8 million Indians older than 60 years live with dementia. Dementia is more prevalent among females than males and in rural than urban areas. Significant cross-state variation exists in dementia prevalence.

By 2050, 11.44 million people in India are expected to be living with dementia, which is up from 3.84 million in 2019, according to the Global Burden of Disease study published in the Lancet Public Health last year.