"Sometimes small changes in thinking can have a big impact on your quality of life."ĭr Gurvich and her colleagues are still trying to understand what causes this hormonally-induced brain fog but they do have some ideas. It's not like a mild cognitive impairment which can be a precursor to Alzheimer's, but it is enough to have a substantial impact on someone's life, she says. "There is a reasonable proportion of women who go through the menopause transition and experience cognitive change, and that is associated with an objective cognitive decline," Dr Gurvich says. However, the dictionary's earliest citation for "brain fog" is from 1853, in a Pennsylvanian newspaper called the German Reformed Messenger.ĭr Gurvich is researching the cognitive changes that occur during menopause and across the menstrual cycle. "In fact, the earliest sense of the adjectival form 'foggy' mostly refers to mental states." "People speak of 'the thick fog of ignorance' and so on," he says. Where did the term brain fog come from?ĭr Gurvich really didn't hear the term "brain fog" used until a few years ago, although it seems to be used a lot more now, she says.Ī search for the term in the scientific literature reveals some early references to it in the mid- to late-1990s, in the context of people describing their experiences with chronic fatigue syndrome.ĪBC language researcher Tiger Webb says the word 'fog' first appears in reference to weather events in English in the mid-16th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and a figurative sense develops almost immediately. While we don't really understand how these things influence brain fog, he says, "it's interesting that all those things also affect the microbiome as well". He also thinks lots of medications can increase brain fog, and nutrition definitely does. "Particularly these days, people are not getting the right amount of sleep, and anything can disrupt sleep," he says. In Professor Stough's opinion, lack of sleep and poor sleep quality are the biggest contributors to brain fog. "And it will depend different reasons people experience brain fog, as to whether there's an actual change to someone's cognition or just a feeling that they're not thinking clearly." "We don't know that yet," Dr Gurvich says. There's still a lot we don't know about how coronavirus affects the brain.īut in terms of brain fog more generally, it's not even clear whether this subjective experience actually relates to an objective neuropsychological or cognitive change. What causes brain fog?īrain fog is associated with a range of different causes, Dr Gurvich says, from medical conditions like fibromyalgia, hormonal changes related to menopause and the menstrual cycle, to nutrition, stress, anxiety and fatigue.Ĭhronic stress may contribute to the feeling of brain fog that's reported by people living under extreme lockdown during the pandemic.Īnd brain fog also seems to be common in people who have had coronavirus, months after their infection has cleared. It's a feeling that our brain isn't working to its cognitive potential or to its normal level, says Con Stough, a cognitive neuroscientist at Swinburne University.Īnother way we can experience it, Professor Stough says, is when we get that feeling that we're really slowing down in terms of how we process information. "It's kind of the subjective experience of not thinking clearly, feeling a bit foggy in the brain." Any one of these symptoms can be described as brain fog, says clinical neuropsychologist Caroline Gurvich of Monash University, whose research focuses on cognition and women's mental health.īut although it's a term you may hear quite a lot - from people undergoing chemotherapy to COVID-19 long-haulers - it's not one that's formally recognised in medicine or psychology.
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