Today in Weird patienta young woman who forgets the faces of her loved ones after contracting Covid-19.
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Annie, a 28-year-old American woman, contracted Covid-19 in March 2020March 2020 and since then his life has changed. “ The first time I met Annie, she told me that she was no longer able to recognize the faces of her family members. », says Marie-Luise Kieseler, doctoral student at Social Perception Lab located in Dartmouth, a town in New Hampshire in the United States. The young woman remembers the day when she had planned to meet her family at the restaurant – the first time since she contracted Covid-19 – and that she passed by the table reserved by her relatives without recognizing them . “ It was like my father’s voice was coming from a stranger », recalls the patient.
Forgetting the faces of those close to you
The deleterious effects of Covid-19 on the brain and cognition are now well documented: loss of smell and taste, problems with memory and concentration or even the impression of being in a fogfog constant mentality. But Annie’s case is unique in the medical literature. Covid-19 would have caused “face blindness” or prosopagnosiaprosopagnosia.
Annie’s prosopagnosia is accompanied by very disabling orientation problems on a daily basis. She is obliged to use a marker on Google Maps to find his carcar in the parking lot and frequently gets lost between supermarket stalls. “ This concomitance is probably due to the fact that these two capacities depend on neighboring regions in the lobe temporaltemporal », specifies Brad Duchaine, author of the study published in Cortex with Marie-Luise Kieseler.
An unprecedented consequence of Covid-19
Doctors used several tests to confirm Annie’s prosopagnosia. During the Cambridge Face Memory Test, a patient memorizes the faces of six people then must recognize them among other unknown faces. On average, cognitively healthy participants correctly recognized 80% of faces; Annie, she only recognized 56% of it. His other cognitive abilities – apart from orientation – are normal, even above average for voice recognition; doctors therefore assume that it was Annie’s visual system that was affected by Covid-19.
Many patients with long Covid have reported a reduction in their cognitive abilities after infection, but prosopagnosia remains an extremely rare consequence of Covid-19. Moreover, the researchers who took care of Annie are trying to find other patients in the same situation as her.
