Rare case of face blindness following COVID-19 infection reported

Acquired prosopagnosia results from damage to the occipitotemporal face-processing network and frequently co-occurs with deficits that impact navigation, colour perception, and object recognition.

The case described in the study is of a 28-year-old woman, Annie, who contracted COVID-19 in March 2020, before which she had normal face recognition. After two months, she noticed difficulties in face recognition with symptom relapses, and her deficits with faces have persisted. Annie showed evident impairments on two tests of familiar face recognition and two tests of unfamiliar face recognition. However, her scores on tests assessing face detection, object recognition, non-visual memory, and scene recognition were normal.

There is a frequent co-occurrence of navigational deficits with prosopagnosia, and Annie reported that her navigational abilities are substantially worse than before she became ill. Self-report survey data from 54 respondents with long COVID revealed that most reported reduced navigation abilities and visual recognition.

"Our findings suggest that a substantial number of people with PASC/long COVID experiencing selective visual deficits and show that future work should aim to understand the nature of these deficits and whether intervention can be developed to lessen their impact," the researchers wrote.

To conclude, Annie's results suggest that COVID-19 can produce severe and selective neuropsychological impairment like deficits following brain damage. High-level visual impairments appear not uncommon in people with long COVID.

Reference:

Kieseler, M., & Duchaine, B. (2023). Persistent prosopagnosia following COVID-19. Cortex. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2023.01.012