Teen brains age prematurely due to restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic

Pandemic-related stress has accelerated teen brain aging.

Even if you’ve come out of adolescence very late, you may remember that this can be a turbulent 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 its associated lockdowns.

A recent study by scientists from Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco concluded that the pandemic may “accelerate” some reorganization and thinning of the cortex, as well as an increase in the volume of the hippocampus and parts of the amygdala. in the brain.

“We already knew from global studies that the pandemic was negatively impacting the mental health of young people, but we didn’t know what it was doing,” says psychologist Ian Gottlieb, director of the Stanford Institute for Neurodevelopment, Affect and Psychopathology Laboratory. SNAP) in California. physically with their brains.

The team studied magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brains of 81 people before the pandemic (November 2016 to November 2019) and 82 people during the pandemic (October 2020 to March 2022), but after the easing of quarantine restrictions (spring 2020 in California).

The researchers then matched people from both groups using factors such as gender, age, puberty, race, early life stressors, and socioeconomic status to give them multiple points of comparison.

The survey showed that the process of brain aging accelerated in the post-pandemic group. Shutdown periods of less than a year resulted in the equivalent of three years of brain aging in second-choice young adults.

Deterioration in mental health has also been noted in the post-pandemic group, although it is not clear if this is directly related to brain age. What this study cannot tell us is whether these changes will be permanent, or whether new mental health problems will arise due to accelerated changes in these key brain structures.

The team plans to keep tracking the same group of people as they get older, looking for new changes in brain structure and possible mental health complications.

All boys were recruited to study depression during puberty. However, the emergence of COVID-19 and the hiatus in research during lockdowns have steered research in a different direction.

The findings may point to the need for adjustments to other brain studies, which should take into account the acceleration of neuronal aging.

The study was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: A Global Open Science.

Source: Science Alert

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