Reacción a "Reactions: brain health of patients hospitalized for covid worsened similar to that of others admitted with similar severity"

This is a necessary study. It confirms some findings that many people had experienced and to which the scientific evidence pointed: some people with covid have difficulty concentrating, remembering or performing other cognitive tasks. Fortunately, this is becoming less and less common, probably related to immunity acquired at the personal or population level with vaccinations and previous infections, or with the emergence of new variants. What this study shows is that this phenomenon is not unique to covid, but that people who had other diseases with similar severity to the covid patients included in the study also had some cognitive impairment, to a degree similar to that seen in infected patients.

There has been much debate about whether SARS-CoV-2 "invades" the brain and causes irreversible brain lesions, something about which there is less and less data in favor. In many cases, it is believed that the virus acts as a "neuroturist" and gains access to the central nervous system when the barriers defending it are disrupted as a result of severe infection and multiple complications in other organs and systems, which would also occur in other patients critically ill with other diseases.

Regarding the limitations of the study, any evidence must always be put in context. First, the evaluation of the patients was done almost a year and a half after infection, which is a somewhat distant period, so we do not have much information on how these patients were doing in the most immediate months after their process. Secondly, the cognitive assessment that was done was relatively simple and might not be able to detect problems or alterations in other brain systems, although, since the same battery was used in all participants, this problem would be common to all of them. Thirdly, there could be a certain selection of patients, since only 20% of the patients who could potentially have been candidates participated, so it cannot be excluded that the other patients were better or worse off than these.