ABSTRACT
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant impact on the mental health of health workers that has brought many hospitals to launch immediate preventive mental health programs. Objective(s): (1) To adapt and enhance a smartphone app (PRESTOapp) for health workers with mental health symptoms related to the COVID-19, and (2) to demonstrate its potential effectiveness in significantly reducing anxiety-depressive and PTSD symptoms in this population. We aim to incorporate Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based techniques in a chatbot userinterface that will enable a more personalized and accurate monitoring and intervention. Method(s): An 18-months study with a 6-months preliminary phase to adapt PRESTOapp to health workers, enhance it with NLP-based techniques and chatbot user-interface, and evaluate its feasibility, and effectiveness in 12-months. Result(s): PRESTOapp has the potential to provide a prompt, personalized and integral response to the mental health demand due to the COVID-19. It will help by providing an innovative digital platform, that will allow remote monitoring of the symptoms course, provide brief psychotherapeutic interventions, and detect urgent situations. If the preliminary results of this study point to a potential effectiveness of the intervention, PRESTOapp may be easily adapted to the general population. Conclusion(s): PRESTOapp may be one of the key digital platforms that may help preventing and treating potentially severe mental health consequences. Considering the unresolved problem of burnout in health workers even before the COVID-19, this project will develop the necessary technology for implementing cost-effective mental health solutions, not only during the pandemic.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Cognitive function may be impaired in COVID-19 patients, especially in executive functions such as phonemic fluency. Among risk factors, inflammation during hospitalization is related with worse cognitive performance in the long term. On the other side, it has been shown that cognitive reserve (CR) protects against cognitive impairment associated with brain damage, psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. Objective(s): Our aim is to study the protective role of cognitive reserve in phonemic fluency to inflammation after SARS-CoV-2 infection. Method(s): We enrolled a cohort of 102 severe SARS-CoV-2 survivors after Intensive Care Unit (ICU) discharge and 58 agreed to participate in this 6-month follow-up study. Patients with previously known cognitive impairment were excluded. Demographic, clinical and laboratory data were collected. To assess the phonemic fluency, we used the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) controlling the effects of age and education. Inflammation was recorded according to the number of days with high CRP. ANCOVAanalyses were used to test the effect of interaction between medical variables and cognitive reserve on phonemic fluency. Result(s): The COVID-19 inflammation interacted with CR in phonemic fluency (F= 6.47, p= 0.01), with worse performance in patients with low CR (mean 16.7 (10.2-23.3)) than those with high CR (mean 37.7 (34.3-41.2)) in function of number of days with high PCR during ICU stay. Conclusion(s): The role of the cognitive reserve is important to reduce the cognitive impairment related with COVID-19 inflammation in post-ICU patients.