Just when health workers thought that they had already identified all the symptoms of COVID-19, a latest study comes along, claiming that some patients suffer from a condition generally known as “face blindness.”
The bizarre symptom that makes one unable to acknowledge familiar faces, including family members, is rare but alarming. Scientifically called prosopagnosia, face blindness impairs the flexibility to discern one face from one other, in response to US News & World Report.
Marie-Luise Kieseler, a researcher on the Dartmouth College Social Perception Lab in Hanover, Recent Hampshire, told the outlet that the condition typically arises when there’s damage to the brain’s face-processing network following a stroke or head injury.
But Kieseler and her colleague, Brad Duchaine, have identified the primary case of face blindness related to COVID-19 infection.
In a single case report published in Cortex, the duo described the case of a 28-year-old woman named Annie, who contracted the novel coronavirus in March 2020.
Annie had a rough experience when she contracted the virus, suffering a high fever, diarrhea, coughing spells and shortness of breath. She also fainted from lack of oxygen at times. After three weeks, she recovered from the initial infection only to start out experiencing feelings of disorientation several weeks later. She also realized something was off when she couldn’t perceive faces appropriately.
In June 2020, a shocking incident happened when she decided to satisfy along with her family for dinner for the primary time since she battled the disease. On the restaurant, she walked right past her family members since she couldn’t recognize their faces.
When a person called Annie’s name, she turned to the familiar voice only to be stunned that it was from a face she couldn’t recognize. “It was as if my dad’s voice got here out of a stranger’s face,” she said.
Upon evaluation by the Dartmouth team, all evidence pointed to a deficit in face memory processing. But along with prosopagnosia, Annie also had difficulty navigating once-familiar places. She even has to depend on the Google Map pin function to recollect where she had parked her automobile.
“The mixture of prosopagnosia and navigational deficits that Annie had is something that caught our attention since the two deficits often go hand in hand after any individual either has had brain damage or developmental deficits,” Duchaine said, as per Each day Star.
“It has been known that there are broad cognitive problems that may be attributable to COVID-19, but here we’re seeing severe and highly selective problems in Annie, and that implies there is likely to be a whole lot of other individuals who have quite severe and selective deficits following COVID,” he added.
It’s unclear how a respiratory infection could lead on to persistent neurological issues for some people even after their bout with the disease. It’s also unknown if the problem improves or resolves by itself. Kieseler noted that there is no such thing as a cure for prosopagnosia at present; patients learn to compensate. In Annie’s case, she identifies her family members through their voices.