the stress of living pandemic lockdowns have accelerated aging in the adolescent brain. The effects are similar to those previously observed as a result of violence, neglect, and family dysfunction.
Even if you’re past adolescence, you can remember that it can be a tumultuous time in terms of thoughts and feelings, and there’s a lot of reorganization going on in the brain, even without a global pandemic and associated lockdowns.
A recent study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco, concluded that the pandemic had “accelerated” some of this reorganization, the thinning of the cortex and the increase in size of the hippocampus and sections of the brain. tonsil of the brain
“We already know from global research that the pandemic has negatively affected the mental health of young people, but we didn’t know what, if anything, it was physically doing to their brains.” says psychologist Ian GotlibDirector of the Stanford Laboratory of Neurodevelopment, Affect and Psychopathology (SNAP) in California.
The team looked magnetic resonance imaging ( magnetic resonance) brain scans of 81 children taken before the pandemic (between November 2016 and November 2019), and 82 children taken during the pandemic (between October 2020 and March 2022) but after lockdown restrictions were relaxed ( spring 2020, in California).
The researchers then matched the children from both groups using factors including gender, age, pubertal status, ethnicity, early life stress and socioeconomic background, to give them multiple points of comparison.
What the scans showed was that the brain aging process had apparently accelerated in the post-pandemic group. Confinement periods of less than a year had resulted in the equivalent of three years of brain aging in the second selection of youth.
Poorer mental health was also noted in the post-pandemic group, though it’s not clear if that’s directly related to brain age. What this study cannot tell us is whether these changes are going to be permanent, or whether there will be further mental health problems that will arise from the accelerated changes in these key brain structures.
“Will your chronological age eventually catch up with your ‘brain age’?” Gotlib asks. “If your brain remains permanently older than your chronological age, it’s unclear what the results will be in the future.
“For a 70- or 80-year-old, one would expect some cognitive and memory problems based on changes in the brain, but what does it mean for a 16-year-old to have their brain age prematurely?”
More research will be required to find out. The team plans to continue tracking the same group of people as they age, looking for additional changes in brain structure and any mental health complications that may develop.
All the young people had been recruited for a study on depression during puberty. However, the arrival of COVID-19 — and a necessary pause in study during lockdowns — sent the investigation in a different direction.
The findings could indicate the need to correct other brain studies that should take into account this acceleration of neurological aging. Children who have survived the pandemic will not necessarily be in the same neurological state as children who came before them, although identifying those differences will not be easy.
“The pandemic is a global phenomenon, there is no one who has not experienced it”, says gotlib. “There is no real control group.”
The research has been published in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.
