A new study shows that doing progressively challenging computerized brain exercises (with coaching) drove significant gains across multiple symptoms of people with long COVID-19, producing ‘large’ to ‘very large’ improvements in the primary measure of functional performance at daily tasks.
In addition, there were improvements in other symptoms of Long COVID (depression, fatigue, and brain fog) and in cognitive processing speed. Furthermore, in a six-month follow-up, eighty percent of participants in the brain exercise group had returned to work, compared to none in the comparison group.
This was a modest-sized, randomized controlled trial conducted independently at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and reported in the APA journal Rehabilitation Psychology.
The study deployed progressively challenging computerized brain exercises alongside a progressively challenging coaching approach. The brain exercise used in the study is commercially-available only in the brain exercise app, BrainHQ made by Posit Science.
While estimates of those still coping with Long COVID vary, some 20 million U.S. citizens have been diagnosed with Long COVID, and an estimated 9-10 million still report symptoms, with nearly 14% reporting an inability to return to work even 90 days after infection.
The UAB study showed that the intervention resulted in statistically significant and very large benefits on its primary measures of performance and satisfaction with daily activities.
It also showed significant benefits in many secondary measures, including large to very large benefits on depressive, fatigue, and brain fog symptoms, as well as a significant benefit in brain processing speed, and a trend toward large benefits on anxiety symptoms. No significant change was noted in a measure of global cognition.
The researchers reported that eighty percent of the non-retired participants in the intervention group returned to work, and none in the control group. This was a modest-sized study designed primarily to assess feasibility and to help scope follow-on studies. The researchers enrolled 16 community residents, who were three or more months past COVID infection, with mild cognitive impairment and with dysfunction in the performance of instrumental activities of daily living. Participants were randomly assigned to the intervention or to a wait-list control.
The intervention is based on the science of neuroplasticity, which has established that intensive, repetitive, and progressively challenging activities can drive beneficial changes to the brain.
Prior studies of BrainHQ exercises in older adults, and in patients with various health conditions, (cancer, heart failure, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, mild cognitive impairment) suggested the kind of improvements seen in this study (in cognition, daily activities, depressive symptoms, stress, fatigue, and employment status). However, the magnitude of the improvements in this study were quite large as compared to some prior studies.
