6 Thursday November 11 2021 | the times
times2
W
e may be
staggering,
zombie-like,
out of one
disaster, but
now it
seems we
could be
entering another. If you’re prone these
days to misplacing your keys or
struggling to remember everyday tasks
that were second nature before the
pandemic, it could be something more
significant. The post-Covid malaise
we’re feeling might not just be a minor
jolt caused by the upheaval of the past
18 months. Scientifically speaking, our
brains may have declined.
New research by academics at the
University of Exeter and King’s
College London suggests that older
people whose levels of anxiety and
depression spiked during the
pandemic have come out the other
side with a diminishment in their
short-term memory equivalent to six
years of natural ageing. Those over 50
have seen their brains age five years in
18 months.
has not been made available to fellow
researchers. “It is quite graphic to
present the decrease in test scores as
equivalent to the ‘normal’ decline seen
over five or six years. However, it is
also slightly misleading as it possibly
implies that the deficits are progressive
and irreversible or may even suggest
that dementia has been triggered in
some way by lockdown.”
Others are more direct. “We should
be very worried,” says Professor James
Goodwin of Loughborough University,
the director of science and research
impact at the Brain Health Network
and author of Supercharge Your Brain:
How to Maintain a Healthy Brain
Throughout Your Life. Goodwin says
that “if you wanted a programmeLockdown brain
fog: if you’ve got
it, can you reboot
your memory?
New research suggests the minds of some over-50s
have aged five years in 18 months. So what can we
do about it, Chris Stokel-Walker asks the experts
“It’s given us the ability to see what
changed during the pandemic,” says
Dr Helen Brooker, a senior research
fellow at the University of Exeter who
specialises in dementia and ageing
research. Brooker led the Protect
study, the interim findings of which
were published this week at an
academic conference. The project,
running since 2015, sets participants
over the age of 50 questions every
year designed to test their mental
faculties. The six computerised tests
take about 15 minutes and explore
someone’s ability to conduct verbal
reasoning and paired associate
learning (matching one item or word
to another) among other tasks.
The participants are also asked
about feelings of depression and
anxiety in a further 16 questions. The
idea of the project is to see how our
brains age healthily and why people
end up developing dementia. The goal
is to find out what — if any — lifestyle
changes could help to reduce the risk
of dementia in later life. The study
coincided with a cataclysm affecting
all our lives, meaning we could see notjust how normal brains age, but how
they change during a once-in-100-year
global crisis.
But how do you know if your mental
faculties have fallen off a cliff because
of the stresses of the pandemic or just
the natural decline we all feel at a
certain age? We asked the experts.How worried should we be by
the Protect findings?
“These are interesting and somewhat
alarming findings,” says Professor Tom
Dening, the head of the Centre for
Dementia at the University of
Nottingham. Dening calls the scale of
the cognitive decline “surprising”,
pointing out that it’s difficult to know
why it has happened because the data