At the beginning of the pandemic, a 28-year-old visitor service representative and portrait designer contracted COVID-19.
He had a high fever for a few days and difficulty breathing. Their sense of smell and taste have disappeared. But by mid-April 2020, he had recovered enough to start running away from home.
It wasn’t until June, when he saw his circle of relatives for the first time since his illness, that he knew he had lost something else. He may no longer recognize his own father or distinguish him from his uncle.
“My father’s voice came from a stranger’s face,” he later told investigators.
It is not known how many other people have developed facial blindness after having COVID-19. But the woman, whom investigators knew only as “Annie” to protect her privacy, is one of more than 50 longtime COVID patients who reported to Dartmouth College. Researchers in a new study who struggled to identify faces after their infection.
Some other people are born with facial blindness, called prosopagnosia, while others lose the ability to identify faces due to brain damage caused by stroke or brain injury.
Although facial popularity capability is on a spectrum, a recent study found that more than 1% of other people struggle to recognize even the ones they’ve encountered repeatedly.
In the extreme, some other people with the disease can’t even recognize themselves, apologizing for hitting themselves in the mirror. Others cannot identify other family members if they are in an unforeseen context or if they are dressed in a hat. TV plots because the characters look too similar.
Prosopagnosia can cause significant social problems, said Joseph DeGutis, who led the moment and co-founded the Boston Attention and Learning Lab.
“When you recognize people, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re vital to me,'” he said. People with facial blindness unknowingly send the opposite message.
Why the long COVID? Researchers have clues about symptoms
‘This is the beginning’: Doctors struggle to identify remedies for prolonged COVID
Six spaces on one side of the brain are involved in facial recognition. Damage to any of those spaces, especially on the right side of the brain, will likely affect facial recognition. In many cases, DeGutis said, the challenge appears to be a lack of communication between the spaces involved.
About 1 in 200 people are so severely affected that they will not recognize a loved one, such as a spouse, when they are out of context. About 2 in a hundred will have mild cases, although they may worsen with age. or in conditions of social anxiety, said DeGutis, also a researcher at VA Boston Health System and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Opinion: 3 years after COVID-19 lockdowns, are we safe from those dark days?
People with autism are two to three times more likely to have prosopagnosia than the general population.
People with prosopagnosia can identify the emotion in a face and judge the person’s gender, age, and attractiveness. They simply cannot combine the pieces to recognize the whole.
It can be difficult to identify facial blindness consistent with se, DeGutis said. Women seem to be more aware of their weakness than men, which represents more than 70% of the study volunteers, the deficit appears similarly in both sexes.
Self-awareness becomes adulthood. Children and teens ages 10 to 17 were “very bad at how smart they were at facial recognition,” DeGutis said, but the adults were between 20 and 25 years old.
Sara Axelbaum, 40, of Westchester, New York, didn’t realize she had a challenge until she watched “Game of Thrones” with her husband. Although he was able to separate all the characters, to her, they were all indistinguishable bearded men.
Axelbaum’s next diagnosis explained why he had never been able to distinguish his mother from the same double aunt, others seemed to be able to make the distinction.
“I honestly had no idea that other people could describe the shape of someone’s eye,” he said, referring to the moment he witnessed a crime and may not simply identify the perpetrator. “I was like, ‘Wait, what?'”
Desiree Leader, now 59, grew up in a small town, so she didn’t realize how badly she faced until adulthood.
She first heard this when she flew to Arkansas for a close friend’s wedding. The friend he was traveling with alone had seen the bride a few times, but identified her immediately, while Leader struggled to locate the bride in the crowd.
Years later, when Leader joined the local Rotary Club of Princeton, Massachusetts, he hoped to be its newest member. Panicking, she told another member about her problem, and he joked that maybe she had something he just had. Read about facial blindness.
“I looked and thought, ‘Oh my God,'” he said. I’m stupid. I’m self-centered. “
Prosopagnosia was not identified as a condition until the internet became popular in the mid-1990s. Suddenly, other people began to share this deficit with other people who had the same problem. The researchers were interested.
In many people, it is also connected to problems.
“Annie,” who developed face blindness after COVID-19, suddenly also had trouble finding milk at her community grocery store or where her car was in the parking lot. He may still recognize the car, but he could no longer shape it. A map in your brain.
According to the study, he also doesn’t have unusual long-term COVID symptoms, besides fatigue, difficulty concentrating, mental confusion, balance problems, and average migraines.
Dartmouth researchers Brad Duchaine and Marie-luise Kieseler surveyed another 54 people with long-term COVID to see if they also reported adjustments to facial recognition. Many have.
Similarly, members of the long-running COVID organization themselves reported new disruptions when navigating their surroundings, remembering phone numbers, and tracking characters on TV shows. Some even noticed that they had less understanding of colors.
Leader, who was not in the studio, said he could never “find the way out of a paper bag. “
She also remembers in words, pictures.
“When I close my eyes, I don’t see anything. I didn’t realize others were doing it until recently,” he said. “When I read, and I love to read, I go beyond description. It doesn’t make sense. “
People with face blindness also expand compensatory skills. Axelbaum said she’s the one who notices when other people cut their hair or are missing an earring.
The leader can simply distinguish twins from her friends when no one else can, as she reminded the one with a freckle under one eye.
“I try to be more observant, because I have to be,” said Leader, who has since returned to college.
To be diagnosed with prosopagnosia, one desires a series of tests lasting one hour and a low score of at least two. The procedure requires ruling out poor vision or memory, DeGutis said, to be sure the challenge is lack of recognition.
Conventional diagnostic tests require learning new faces, perhaps noticed in other lights or from other angles, or identifying familiar faces, celebrities.
In a celebrity face check, for example, “Annie” only knew about 30%, while other people usually identify 84%. It also scored below 99% of the population in a verification that required it not to forget a new face for a short period of time.
Despite the lack of clear treatments, it’s still helping to get a diagnosis, DeGutis said, because it provides insight into a person’s facial recognition point, whether they’re at a disadvantage or disadvantaged.
DeGutis said many of his patients become friends, consciously or unconsciously, with other people with a distinctive look who are less difficult to recognize. They see a 7-foot-tall user at a party and say, ‘I’m going to be your friend,'” he said.
People have a tendency to compensate for prosopagnosia depending on others or tricks. When she applied for elegance assistant, Leader said she called her students “dear,” “darling” or “darling,” so she wouldn’t have to. Forget their names.
Axelbaum said he has “armed” himself with other people who know his condition, so they whisper a friend’s call when using the technique or introduce themselves temporarily, for the other user to answer.
It’s not that other people with prosopagnosia can never recognize a face, but it takes a lot more exposure to make that face familiar, said Duchaine, a professor of brain and mental sciences.
One man with the disease said he may only recognize President Bill Clinton in his momentary term: It took more than 4 years to see his face enough times to stay.
It’s imaginable to improve facial popularity with practice, DeGutis said, even if it’s not a cure and it’s not easy.
The leader can now recognize members of her Rotary club, even though she recently reached out to a friend from the Chamber of Commerce who came here to speak with the club.
He said he didn’t care about embarrassment or the fact that he had to plan around his facial blindness every time he went out.
But she can’t bear to hurt other people’s feelings.
When he was an assistant coach, Leader once climbed a ski with various categories from his school. While helping a child who had hurt his shoulder, he couldn’t recognize him as his favorite in class.
“You might just see the pain on his face,” Leader said. “For me, that’s the hardest part. “
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday. com.
USA TODAY’s fitness and patient protection policy is made possible in part through a grant from the Masimo Foundation for health care ethics, innovation and competence. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial contributions.