Nagy Boglárka, Protzner Andrea B, Czigler Balázs, Gaál Zsófia Anna
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Geroscience. 2025 Feb;47(1):1277-1301. doi: 10.1007/s11357-024-01324-8. Epub 2024 Aug 29.
Post-COVID syndrome manifests with numerous neurological and cognitive symptoms, the precise origins of which are still not fully understood. As females and older adults are more susceptible to developing this condition, our study aimed to investigate how post-COVID syndrome alters intrinsic brain dynamics in older adults and whether biological sex and cognitive training might modulate these effects, with a specific focus on older females. The participants, aged between 60 and 75 years, were divided into three experimental groups: healthy old female, post-COVID old female and post-COVID old male. They underwent an adaptive task-switching training protocol. We analysed multiscale entropy and spectral power density of resting-state EEG data collected before and after the training to assess neural signal complexity and oscillatory power, respectively. We found no difference between post-COVID females and males before training, indicating that post-COVID similarly affected both sexes. However, cognitive training was effective only in post-COVID females and not in males, by modulating local neural processing capacity. This improvement was further evidenced by comparing healthy and post-COVID females, wherein the latter group showed increased finer timescale entropy (1-30 ms) and higher frequency band power (11-40 Hz) before training, but these differences disappeared following cognitive training. Our results suggest that in older adults with post-COVID syndrome, there is a pronounced shift from more global to local neural processing, potentially contributing to accelerated neural aging in this condition. However, cognitive training seems to offer a promising intervention method for modulating these changes in brain dynamics, especially among females.
新冠后综合征表现为多种神经和认知症状，其确切病因仍未完全明确。由于女性和老年人更容易患上这种疾病，我们的研究旨在调查新冠后综合征如何改变老年人的大脑内在动力学，以及生物性别和认知训练是否可能调节这些影响，特别关注老年女性。参与者年龄在60至75岁之间，分为三个实验组：健康老年女性、新冠后老年女性和新冠后老年男性。他们接受了适应性任务切换训练方案。我们分析了训练前后收集的静息态脑电图数据的多尺度熵和频谱功率密度，分别评估神经信号复杂性和振荡功率。我们发现训练前新冠后女性和男性之间没有差异，表明新冠后对两性的影响相似。然而，认知训练仅对新冠后女性有效，对男性无效，通过调节局部神经处理能力。通过比较健康女性和新冠后女性进一步证明了这种改善，其中后一组在训练前表现出更高的精细时间尺度熵（1-30毫秒）和更高频段功率（11-40赫兹），但这些差异在认知训练后消失。我们的结果表明，在患有新冠后综合征的老年人中，存在从更全局到局部神经处理的明显转变，这可能导致这种情况下神经衰老加速。然而，认知训练似乎为调节大脑动力学的这些变化提供了一种有前景的干预方法，尤其是在女性中。
