Covid-19 ‘brain fog’ narratives in institutional, news media and academic sources

Background Covid-19-related ‘brain fog’ is “not a medical term” (Budson 2021) – disseminating sources tell us – but, rather, a set of cognitive symptoms, “which people call brain fog” (WHO 2021, emph. added). So careful are these sources in specifying the popular connotation of the phrase, as medical scholars are comfortable in their use of the same expression: the WHO Covid-19 Research Database returns 329 (as of 15 Mar. 2023) studies on Covid-19 mentioning ‘brain fog’. Aims This paper would like to investigate the definition of the term ‘brain fog’, in and post Covid-19, at the popular and specialised levels – which thing, to the author’s knowledge, has only been tentatively researched medically (cf. Miyake & Martin 2021, McWhirter et al. 2022) and not at all thoroughly from a linguistic viewpoint, yet. A more specific research question is: how is this phenomenon narrated by those experiencing it, and perceived and reported by different sources? Methods Two corpora of news media (919) and research articles (329) (1 Dec. 2019 – 13 Mar. 2023) have been collected for this purpose, to which hand-picked texts from disseminating medical sources (such as the WHO) have been added. A qualitative-quantitative analysis will be conducted on these, following corpus-assisted methods (Baker 2006, McEnery & Brezina 2022), as well as studies in narrative (Toolan 1988/2001) and narrative medicine (Charon et al. 2017). Expected results and relevance The study is expected to return a current overview of the definitions and descriptions given of the medical condition by both patients and professionals. The results will inscribe themselves within – and hopefully expand – an ongoing research interest in the linguistic nature of medical definitions based on narratives (Grego & Grego 2021, Grego & Grego forthcoming). They will also expectedly contribute to investigating digital medical communication in times of knowledge shift or, even, knowledge negotiation, between professionals and non-professionals.