Teenagers’ Brains Get Older in COVID-19 Pandemic Era, Scientists Say

VIVA – Unusual experiences such as online school and social isolation have made the past few years particularly tough for teenagers in the Covid-19 pandemic era.

A small study comparing brain scans of young people from before and after 2020 reveals that the teenagers’ brain scans of young people from before and after 2020 reveal that the brains of teens who lived through the pandemic look about three years older than expected, scientists say.

This research, published December 1 in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, is the first to look at the impact of the pandemic on brain aging or mental.

The finding reveals that “the pandemic hasn’t been bad just in terms of mental health for adolescents. It seems to have altered their brains as well” says Ian Gotlib, a clinical neuroscientist at Stanford University, as launched from Science News, on February, Tuesday 7, 2023.

The roots of this study date back to nearly a decade ago, when Gotlib and his colleagues launched a project in California’s Bay Area to study depression in adolescents. The researchers were collecting information on the mental health of the kids in the study and did MRI scans of their brains.

Lockdown orders in the spring of 2020 forced the researchers to stop the project. When they restarted a year later, Gotlib worried that stress from the pandemic threatened to skew their results.

It turned out that the kids making their way back to the study after a year of pandemic life were reporting higher rates of anxiety and depression than their peers from before 2020. So, the team decided to compare brain scans captured before the start of the pandemic with scans taken between October 2020 and March 2022.

The researchers looked at differences in 64 scans from each group, matched by the kids’ sex and age, with an average age of around 16 for each group.

The result was showing adolescent brains naturally go through a maturation process that results in the thickening of the hippocampus, an area involved with memory and concentration, and the amygdala, which regulates emotional processing. At the same time, the cortex an area that regulates emotional functioning starts thinning. 

The brain scans revealed that this maturation process had moved more quickly in teens who had lived through the pandemic. Gotlib says that their brains appeared three to four years older than the brains of the teens scanned before the start of the pandemic. 

Gotlib suspects that stress is to blame. Previous studies have shown that exposure to violence or negligence can lead to accelerated brain maturation in children. Considering that mental health plummeted for teens during the pandemic.

“It’s not a big leap” to think that the stressful conditions could also have shaped brain development in his study’s cohort, Gotlib says.

And it’s unclear whether accelerated brain aging has impacted teen health, or if issues will manifest later in life. Either way, ensuring that people have access to mental health services will be crucial to helping children during the pandemic.