Assessment of COVID-19 lockdown effect on early Alzheimer Disease progression

Recently, many aspects of daily life have changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Patients with Alzheimer Disease (AD) could be more vulnerable to those daily life changes as experts expected. Mainly, the lockdown involved reduced social contact and cognitive stimulation. So, it could affect the AD expression, increasing the patients' disabilities development.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of COVID-19 lockdown on cognitive impairment progression in early AD patients.

The participants were patients with mild cognitive impairment due to AD (MCI-AD) from the Neurology Unit (La Fe Hospital), who were neuropsychologically evaluated (cognitive impairment, daily activity tests) twice over 2 years. They were classified into a case group (n = 21), evaluated before and after lockdown condition, and a control group (n = 20), evaluated entirely before the lockdown condition.

All the participants showed increasing cognitive impairment and functional deterioration over the 2-year period of evaluation (p < 0.05). However, a faster worsening was not observed as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown condition. In fact, the statistical significance observed between the two study groups for daily life activities showed that the worsening was even lesser in the group evaluated under the lockdown condition.

Medium-term effects of COVID-19 lockdown could not involve an acceleration of the cognitive decline in MCI-AD patients in a 2-year evaluation period. In addition, the least worsening observed for daily living activities in the case group was probably due to the change in routines. Therefore, the common assumption of cognitive worsening of AD progression due to the lockdown in comparison with normal disease progression was not demonstrated in this study, at least for MCI-AD cases. However, more longitudinal studies are required to evaluate long-term effects in these patients.