The US-based peer-reviewed medical journal Cortex shared a very remarkable coronavirus case with its readers this month.

According to Dartmouth College's research, the 28-year-old American woman, whose name was stated to be Annie, became the first and only person to get 'prosopagnosia' as a result of coronavirus infection.

Her Family Passed By But She Couldn't Recognize It

Annie, an amateur artist who works as a client agent, discovered her problem two months after she recovered from the coronavirus infection.

The young woman, who had agreed to meet her family at a restaurant, did not recognize her family when she went there and passed by them twice. Hearing her father's voice, the woman experienced the shock of her life when she looked at them. She didn't recognize any of the faces before her.

"My Father's Voice Sounded Like It Was From A Stranger's Face"

“My father's voice sounded like it was coming out of a stranger's face,” Annie said. His only problem was that he couldn't recognize faces.

The woman, who also has problems with her sense of direction, now has difficulty in going to the market and finding her car where she parked it.

The young woman, who told that she was lost even on the roads she knew by heart for years, now has to continue her life with navigation applications.

She Also Has Difficulty to Learn New Names

Doctors gave the young woman a series of tests to assess Annie's facial recognition problems and determine if she had problems with her other perceptual or cognitive abilities. The results were appalling. Annie not only had a hard time remembering the names of people she knew, but also had trouble learning new identities.

"The first thing that caught our attention was Annnie's combination of prosopagnosia and wayfinding disorders, because if a person has brain damage or developmental disabilities, those two issues often go hand in hand," said Brad Duchaine of the Social Perception Lab at Dartmouth.

Face Blindness Caused By Coronavirus

Doctors who discovered that Annie's condition was 'face blindness', also known as 'prosopagnosia', that the cause of the woman's problem was coronavirus infection, which causes brain fog, memory problems and other neurological effects such as loss of smell and taste, and deepened their research on the subject.

Brad Duchaine and his team's research was published this month in the journal Cortex. Noting that his work examines the face blindness and perception problems caused by the coronavirus, Duchaine said, "This is a situation that everyone, especially doctors and healthcare professionals, should know."

What is Face Blindness (PROZOPAGNOSIA)?

Face blindness is a cognitive disorder related to face perception. This condition, called 'prosopagnosia', is characterized as the inability of people to make connections between them despite seeing elements such as face, mouth and eyes.

Face blindness usually begins when a person whose face is very well known is not visually recognized and is a complete stranger. Patients cannot even recognize very close family members by looking at their faces.

According to the US Institute of Neurological Disorders, 'face blindness' can result from stroke, traumatic brain injury or certain neurological problems. There is no known cure for the disease.