The brains of teenagers who lived through the Covid pandemic show signs of premature aging, research suggests.
The researchers compared MRIs of 81 adolescents in the US taken before the pandemic, between November 2016 and November 2019, with those of 82 adolescents collected between October 2020 and March 2022, during the pandemic but after the blockades were lifted.
After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence, such as thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and amygdala, they were higher in the post-lockdown period. group than in the pre-pandemic group, suggesting that such processes had been accelerated. In other words, their brains had aged faster.
“The brain age difference was about three years; we did not expect such a large increase given that the lockdown was less than a year. [long]said Ian Gotlib, professor of psychology at Stanford University and first author of the study.
writing in the diary Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the team reports that the participants, a representative sample of adolescents in California’s Bay Area, originally agreed to participate in a study looking at the impact of early life stress on mental health during puberty. As a result, the participants were also tested for symptoms of depression and anxiety.
The post-lockdown group reported greater mental health difficulties, including more severe symptoms of anxiety, depression, and problems with internalization.
Gotlib said the findings are consistent with those of other researchers studying the impact of the pandemic on adolescent mental health. “The decline in mental health is accompanied by physical changes in the adolescent brain, likely due to the stress of the pandemic,” she said.
But it’s not yet clear if the worse mental health captured in the study is due to faster brain aging, or even if the latter is bad news for teens.
“We don’t know that yet; we are starting to rescan all participants at age 20, so we will have a better idea of whether these changes persist or start to diminish over time,” Gotlib said.
“In older adults, these brain changes are often associated with reduced cognitive functioning. It is not yet clear what they mean in adolescents. But this is the first demonstration that mental health difficulties during the pandemic are accompanied by what appear to be stress-related changes in brain structure.”
Michael Thomas, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Birkbeck University in London, who was not involved in the study, said the research confirmed the struggles adolescents in particular experienced during the pandemic, with increases in anxiety and depression. But, he added, it was hard to know what differences in brain structure size meant for current or future behavior.
“Large-scale measurements of the brain do not tell us about the detailed circuitry that drives behavior. I would say it is very speculative what the long-term consequences will be, if any, and whether these brain changes will be long-lasting or disappear.”
Thomas also stressed that it was not clear that the potential impacts would necessarily be negative, noting that some of the accelerated changes reported by the team were also associated with higher performance, such as on intelligence tests.
“London taxi drivers were also reported to have larger seahorses,” he said. “In summary, this is interesting data to show that the pandemic may have had profound effects on adolescents, enough to be reflected in measures of brain structure; But these data cannot tell us whether negative long-term outcomes are inevitable or whether brain plasticity will allow this generation to bounce back.”
