Stress is part of daily living pandemicTeenagers’ brains have seen a rapid increase in aging due to lockdowns. Similar effects have been observed previously as a result violence, neglect, family dysfunction, and abuse.
Even if you’ve left adolescence far behind, you might remember that it can be a tumultuous time in terms of thoughts and feelings, and there’s a lot of reorganizing that goes on in the brain – even without a global pandemic and the associated lockdowns.
Recent research by Stanford University researchers and the University of California San Francisco found that the pandemic had accelerated some of the brain reorganization. This included the thinning of the cortex and increasing size of the amygdala, hippocampus, and cortex sections.
“We know that the pandemic is having a negative impact on mental health among youths, but we don’t know what it was doing to their brains, if any.” says psychologist Ian GotlibDirector, Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, & Psychopathology Laboratory (SNAP) in California.
The team reviewed Imaging by resonance ( MRI) 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 had eased (spring 2020, in California).
Next, researchers matched children from both genders using factors like sex, age and pubertal status as well as ethnicity, early life stress, socioeconomic background and other variables to create multiple comparison points.
The scans revealed that brain aging had apparently accelerated in the post pandemic group. The equivalent of three years of brain age in the second group of children was achieved by locking down for a period less than a full year.
The post-pandemic group also had poorer mental health, although it isn’t clear if this is directly related to brain age. This study cannot tell us if these changes will be permanent or if there will be further mental health problems due to the rapid changes in key brain structures.
“Will their chronological years catch up with their brain age?” Gotlib. “If their brain continues to age more than their chronological age, it is not clear what the future will look like.”
“For 70- or 80-year olds, you would expect cognitive and memory problems based upon changes in the brain. But what about 16-year olds whose brains are ageing prematurely?”
Further research is needed to determine this. The team plans on continuing to track the same group as they age, looking out for brain changes and mental health issues that might arise.
All of the young men were recruited to participate in a study. Depression during puberty. The arrival of however, COVID-19 – and a necessary pause in the study during lockdowns – sent the research in a different direction.
These findings may indicate the need to correct brain studies that will have this neurological aging acceleration in mind. The neurological state of children who have experienced the pandemic is not necessarily the same as that of their parents, although it may be easier to spot the differences.
“The pandemic is a global phenomenon – there’s no one who hasn’t experienced it,” Gotlib. “There’s no true control group.”
The research has been published in Biological Psychiatry is a Global Open Science.
