A small, quiet life

Re. Sharp rise in memory and thinking problems among U.S. adults, study finds

A study published in September 2025 shows, over the 2013-2023 period, a marked increase in the rate of self-reported cognitive difficulties. That link goes to the reporting on the research, not the article itself, as it's the reporting i want to talk about here.

There's one particular thing that's frustrating me, but before i get to that, the author also does a few things quite well:

  1. Is nuanced and very clear on the study's limitations. No sensationalism here.
  2. Is clear about how the harms are disproportionately affecting already marginalized people.
  3. Has good general advice in the "what you can actually do" section. Those things can all help if you're dealing with cognitive difficulties that do not have a disease as their root cause (and sometimes will help even then).

Now, for the thing that's bugging me. Despite the overall good presentation of nuance in the article, the author totally punted on why the study left out the year 2020. Here are two quotes from the article:

...they also excluded data from 2020 to avoid skewing results with pandemic disruption. (from section "What the Study Actually Measured")

...the researchers excluded the anomalous year of 2020 specifically to reduce pandemic related distortion in the broader trend. (from section "Why Might This Be Happening")

My annoyance stems from the phrases "pandemic disruption" and "pandemic related distortion" in particular. On first read, it was very easy to interpret these to mean that the researchers were excluding that year to flatten the effects of the virus on people. But that isn't the case! If you go to the study itself (which is OA) you'll see this in the Methods section:

We analyzed data from BRFSS surveys conducted between 2013 and 2023, excluding data from 2020 because of significant disruptions in data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected response rates and data completeness.

This phrasing is marginally better, but it's more clear that 2020 is left out due to the lock-down disruptions affecting the data, not in an attempt to obscure the effects of the virus.

The "pandemic disruption" and "during the pandemic" kinds of phrasing is the same lazy usage that is everywhere these days; it's just a little more disappointing in an otherwise well-done publication. It lends itself to being interpreted as if the covid pandemic was a one-time event, now over. When in reality the virus is still here, still disabling people, and still a public health concern.

Tangentially, i hope that the data set this research was based on is continuing to be collected. With the way the CDC's been gutted, though, it seems unlikely.

#brain fog #covid #science