Chronic Pain Chronicles with Dr Karmy
Jun 23, 2026 · 11 min · 9 segments
Many patients with fibromyalgia and chronic pain complain about difficulty with memory and focus. Join Dr Karmy for an interview with Ronessa Dass MScOT/PhD candidate from McMaster University, who…
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Dr. Korn restarted by asking Ronessa, what exactly is brain fog? Because before we study something, we need to know what we're talking about.
It is brain fog is a phenomenon of instances of mental cloudiness that can produce cognitive and emotional impacts, causing difficulties with completing daily tasks and goals, and the impacts can act on a cycle to reinforce the symptoms of brain fog and defer from engagement with evidence-based strategies for comorbid conditions.
And critically, brain fog can actually make it harder for patients to use the very treatment strategies we'd normally recommend.
How was the definition developed? Vanessa didn't just come up with that definition out of thin air.
Her team went through a serious research process, and she explains it well here.
So the first step that we did was a scoping review, and this was to get a lay of the land and see what was out there in the literature.
And then from that definition, we then performed a qualitative study where we were able to elaborate on it with discussions of people with lived experiences.
And then our current study of what my PhD is working on, and this part hasn't been published yet, but we're in the process of peer review, where we established a theoretical framework of brain fog.
And then we're now using that framework to develop a self-report questionnaire of brain fog.
So they're building toward a questionnaire, a scoring tool that would let clinicians actually quantify brain fog the way we quantify pain or depression.
Dr. Korn restarted by asking Ronessa, what exactly is brain fog? Because before we study something, we need to know what we're talking about.
It is brain fog is a phenomenon of instances of mental cloudiness that can produce cognitive and emotional impacts, causing difficulties with completing daily tasks and goals, and the impacts can act on a cycle to reinforce the symptoms of brain fog and defer from engagement with evidence-based strategies for comorbid conditions.
And critically, brain fog can actually make it harder for patients to use the very treatment strategies we'd normally recommend.
How was the definition developed? Vanessa didn't just come up with that definition out of thin air.
Her team went through a serious research process, and she explains it well here.
So the first step that we did was a scoping review, and this was to get a lay of the land and see what was out there in the literature.
And then from that definition, we then performed a qualitative study where we were able to elaborate on it with discussions of people with lived experiences.
And then our current study of what my PhD is working on, and this part hasn't been published yet, but we're in the process of peer review, where we established a theoretical framework of brain fog.
And then we're now using that framework to develop a self-report questionnaire of brain fog.
So they're building toward a questionnaire, a scoring tool that would let clinicians actually quantify brain fog the way we quantify pain or depression.
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