Fig. 5: Impact of COVID-19 on cognitive performance across rates of change in brain age gap. | Nature Communications

Fig. 5: Impact of COVID-19 on cognitive performance across rates of change in brain age gap.

From: Accelerated brain ageing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Fig. 5

The figure illustrates the percentage change in completion time for the Trail Making Test A (TMT-A, top row) and Trail Making Test B (TMT-B, bottom row) over two imaging time points across varying rates of change in brain age gap (BAG). Results are shown for the Pandemic–COVID-19 (G3, N = 134; red), Pandemic–No COVID-19 (G4, N = 298; green), and No Pandemic (G2, N = 564; blue) groups, using both grey matter (GM, left panels) and white matter (WM, right panels) models. A three-year sliding window was used to smooth the curves. Standard error is indicated using shaded areas: light blue (G2), light green (G4), and light red (G3). Boxplots (upper left of each row) display the raw distribution of percentage change in TMT performance, without a sliding window, for GM and WM models. Participants with COVID-19 (G3) showed greater decline in performance (i.e., longer completion times) compared to the Control group (G2), with FDR-corrected p-values of 1.0e-6 (TMT-A) and 9.1e-5 (TMT-B). Significant differences were also observed between COVID-infected (G3) and non-infected (G4) Pandemic participants (FDR-corrected p-values: 7.2e-4 (TMT-A) and 7.4e-4 (TMT-B)). Asterisks indicate statistical significance: *** denotes FDR-corrected p ≤ 0.001; **** denotes FDR-corrected p ≤ 0.0001. Group differences were assessed using two-sample t tests.

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