It’s been almost a year since he had COVID-19, and Bruce Wheeler is still struggling with lingering symptoms, like the headaches that come not just once in a while, but every day for the last seven months.
"It would just feel like there's a knife in my temple, just burning,” he says. “I can get up at eight o'clock in the morning and by 9:30 or 10:00 a.m. I'm back in bed because my head is pounding.”
Wheeler also tires easily. The 74-year-old used to hike in the Alps, but now he can barely make it up the stairs in his house without huffing and puffing. But the thing that really bothers him is what people are calling “brain fog.” He gets disoriented, he can’t focus and he forgets things — and it's not just once in a while. It happens multiple times every day.
“I'll go into the kitchen wanting to get something out of the refrigerator and I open a cabinet,” Wheeler says. “I forget what I'm there for and I’ve gone to the wrong place.”
He’ll watch a movie with his wife and the next morning, he can’t remember what he saw. Even in the moment he’s staring at Russell Crowe on screen, he can’t remember his name.
“And then there's another Australian actress that's in every movie? Do you know the most popular Australian actress?” Wheeler asks me during an interview.
"Nicole Kidman," I say.
“Nicole Kidman,” Wheeler confirms. “Whenever I see them or think of them, I just have a gap. Sometimes it’s very obvious things, sometimes it's somebody who's very important in my life, I just can't remember their name.”
These kinds of persistent cognitive problems have so far been documented mainly among older people who had to be hospitalized for severe cases of COVID-19.
But Wheeler was never in the hospital.
A new study from UCSF researchers suggests brain fog may be more common among patients like Wheeler who had milder cases of COVID-19 and rode their illness out at home. Out of 100 patients tracked, 20 experienced cognitive issues and 14 of them had never been in the hospital.
“We looked at the demographics of these individuals — they were overwhelmingly young,” says Joanna Hellmuth, a cognitive neurologist at UCSF and lead author of the study. “They were in their late 30s, as an average age.”
This is problematic, she says, because most tools used to screen for cognitive issues were designed to detect dementia.
“We have a lot of limited ways that our society thinks about thinking and memory changes. It’s either dementia or it's nothing,” she says. “There's really no in between in these more subtle cognitive disorders that really aren't recognized as much in the medical field.”