Department of Neuroscience & Neurorehabilitation, IRCCS San Raffaele Pisana, Via della Pisana, 235, 00163, Rome, Italy.
Neurology Unit, Policlinico Agostino Gemelli IRCCS, Rome, Italy.
Neurol Sci. 2021 Feb;42(2):455-465. doi: 10.1007/s10072-020-04902-8. Epub 2021 Jan 7.
Healthy elderly, mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease populations have been among the most affected in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the direct effects of the virus, and numerous indirect effects now emerge and will have to be carefully assessed over time.
This article reviews the main articles that have been published so far about the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on these particularly fragile populations.
The pandemic associated to COVID-19 has shifted most of the health resources to the emergency area and has consequently left the three main medical areas dealing with the elderly population (oncology, time-dependent diseases and degenerative disease) temporarily "uncovered". In the phase following the emergency, it will be crucial to guarantee to each area the economic and organizational resources to quickly return to the level of support of the prepandemic state.
The emergency phase represented a significant occasion of discussion on the possibilities of telemedicine which will inevitably become increasingly important, but all the limits of its use in the elderly population have to be considered. In the post-lockdown recovery phase, alongside the classic medical evaluation, the psychological evaluation must become even more important for doctors caring about people with cognitive decline as well as with their caregivers.
由于病毒的直接影响，以及现在出现的众多间接影响，在 COVID-19 大流行的早期，健康的老年人、轻度认知障碍和阿尔茨海默病患者人群受到的影响最大。
本文回顾了迄今为止关于 COVID-19 大流行对这些特别脆弱人群的直接和间接影响的主要文章。
与 COVID-19 相关的大流行将大部分卫生资源转移到了急诊区，因此暂时“暴露”了三个主要的老年人口医疗领域（肿瘤学、时间依赖性疾病和退行性疾病）。在紧急情况结束后，至关重要的是要保证每个领域都有经济和组织资源，以便迅速恢复到大流行前的支持水平。
紧急阶段代表了对远程医疗可能性的重要讨论，远程医疗将不可避免地变得更加重要，但必须考虑到其在老年人群中的所有使用限制。在封锁后恢复阶段，除了经典的医学评估外，心理评估对于照顾认知能力下降的患者以及他们的照顾者的医生来说，必须变得更加重要。
