(P59) Effect of COVID-19 Infection on Nursing Home Resident’s Cognition

Introduction/

Objective: COVID-19 or 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is found to be highly transmissible in the nursing facilities. COVID-19 infection may cause long-term neurologic and neuropsychiatric complications including cognitive decline. The purpose of this research study is to evaluate the effect of COVID-19 infection on nursing home resident's cognition.

Design/Methodology: Charts of residents from 4 different nursing facilities in northwest Ohio region (n=80), who were infected with COVID-19 between March 2020 and September 2020, but not hospitalized, were retrospectively reviewed. The collected data included age, gender, diagnosis of dementia and depression, code status, scores on the Brief Interview for Mental Status (BIMS) that was administered by the nursing staff pre-COVID infection, 1 month, 3 months and 6 months post-COVID infection. Nearly half of the participants had a dementia diagnosis, and nearly two-thirds had a depressive disorder diagnosis.

Results: Analyses of the examining linear, quadratic, and cubic models provided greater detail about the pattern of cognitive decline that residents tended to experience after COVID infection. There was a strong negative correlation between dementia diagnosis (n=36) and BIMS score (8.67 vs 13.8) pre-COVID. Residents’ average pre-COVID BIMS score was 11.49 and results of linear mixed models indicated that there was a significant linear decline in cognitive functioning, as measured by BIMS score, of approximately 1 point over each 3-month post-COVID assessment point (p < 0.01). Moreover, this pattern remained significant despite controlling for resident's dementia diagnosis and age.

Conclusion/

Discussion: Although older residents and those with a diagnosis of dementia had lower cognitive functioning, as evaluated by the BIMS score, compared to younger residents and those without dementia throughout the study, patterns of cognitive decline following COVID infection did not differ depending on resident’s age or dementia diagnosis. While controlling for additional variables such as vaccination status, comorbidities, treatment status for COVID, severity of COVID infection, nursing home residents infected with COVID should be monitored for possible long-term changes in their cognition, as it has implications for the resident’s quality of life and mortality.