Here, we investigated brain changes in 785 UK Biobank participants (aged 51–81)
I'm not doubting the capacity of COVID to damage people cognitively, but I feel like this age range is more prone to cognitive decline than everyone as a whole -it's definitely useful to know but it doesn't seem as alarming as OP's title suggests.
Here, we investigated brain changes in 785 UK Biobank participants (aged 51–81) imaged twice, including 401 cases who tested positive for infection with SARS-CoV-2 between their two scans, with 141 days on average separating their diagnosis and second scan, and 384 controls.
It sounds like they had 401 cases where they had two scans with covid in between so in those cases at least you have a direct paired control. But yeah I'm also skeptical of how big of a practical effect this has on that many people. That being said we're fucking around and finding out about a virus we know little about getting all into our vital organs and causing our immune system to go wild.
I haven't read the study, and refuse to for laziness reasons, but I assume you'd have an understanding of what cognitive decline normally happens, and have a control group that hasn't gotten covid within the timeframe, and then do a between-groups statistical thingy. Once you control for the difference, you can see the effect that covid causes. There is some complicated statistical stuff you do here that I don't remember (and SPSS does it for you).
The sample size is large enough that a decent effect size can be seen.
Of course, that isn't causative proof. For instance, there might be some self-selection bias for people who didn't get covid during the allotted time period. But nonetheless I'd assume that's what they would have done to "prove" a correlation. This stuff gets slammed into you a bunch in undergrad shrinkology.
I'm not doubting the capacity of COVID to damage people cognitively, but I feel like this age range is more prone to cognitive decline than everyone as a whole -it's definitely useful to know but it doesn't seem as alarming as OP's title suggests.
They already controlled for that
That didn’t exactly clarify how they controlled for age factors
384 in the control group, maybe?
It sounds like they had 401 cases where they had two scans with covid in between so in those cases at least you have a direct paired control. But yeah I'm also skeptical of how big of a practical effect this has on that many people. That being said we're fucking around and finding out about a virus we know little about getting all into our vital organs and causing our immune system to go wild.
I haven't read the study, and refuse to for laziness reasons, but I assume you'd have an understanding of what cognitive decline normally happens, and have a control group that hasn't gotten covid within the timeframe, and then do a between-groups statistical thingy. Once you control for the difference, you can see the effect that covid causes. There is some complicated statistical stuff you do here that I don't remember (and SPSS does it for you).
The sample size is large enough that a decent effect size can be seen.
Of course, that isn't causative proof. For instance, there might be some self-selection bias for people who didn't get covid during the allotted time period. But nonetheless I'd assume that's what they would have done to "prove" a correlation. This stuff gets slammed into you a bunch in undergrad shrinkology.
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