More than 77% of people in the US had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 as of 2022.1 Of these, approximately 30% of survivors report having persistent symptoms classified as long COVID2 and 11% describe persistent symptoms at 6 months.3
Patients frequently complain of brain fog, cognitive difficulties, and other neurologic sequelae as the primary drivers of decreased quality of life. These patients also perform worse in cognitive measures of working memory, attention, and processing speed compared to controls.4
A recent study that gave cognitive assessments to more than 100,000 people with and without long COVID confirmed that complaints of brain fog in long COVID patients were correlated with lower cognitive performance in memory, reasoning, and executive function tasks.5 Although mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 have been extremely effective in preventing severe acute disease, the incidence of long COVID has not significantly decreased in the US despite widespread vaccine uptake.6 This indicates that long COVID, also referred to as postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, will remain a medical concern for the foreseeable future.
As a result, it is important that surgeons become familiar with this syndrome in order to continue providing the best care for their patients.