A new study has found there might be a link between prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and Long Covid.
The research focussed on a 28-year-old woman who contracted coronavirus in March of 2020. Her case-study was published in the journal Cortex, and stated that the woman claimed that she was having a hard time identifying faces since first becoming ill.
However, it is important to mention the study includes data from just 50 patients. More extensive and wide-spread research would likely be required to confirm any links.
As reported by Wales Online, a woman known as Annie - although that is not her real name - said: "It was as if my dad’s voice came out of a stranger’s face."
The exact terminology for this is prosopagnosia, which is also known as face blindness. 'Annie' was said to have suffered a 'symptom relapse' two months after first contracting Covid.
The study participant also claimed to have struggled with navigation and remembering she had left certain items after first becoming ill.
Brad Duchaine, a professor of psychological and brain sciences and principal investigator of the Social Perception Lab at Dartmouth said: "The combination of prosopagnosia and navigational deficits that Annie had is something that caught our attention because the two deficits often go hand in hand after somebody either has had brain damage or developmental deficits.
"That co-occurrence is probably due to the two abilities depending on neighbouring brain regions in the temporal lobe."
As part of rigorous testing, Annie was shown 48 famous faces. Members of the public would typically be able to identify 84 percent of them, but Annie was only able to figure out 29 percent.
Professor Duchaine added: "It’s been known that there are broad cognitive problems that can be caused by Covid-19, but here we’re seeing severe and highly selective problems in Annie, and that suggests there might be a lot of other people who have quite severe and selective deficits following Covid."
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