“We already knew from other studies that the pandemic has negatively affected the mental health of young people, but we did not know to what extent their brains have also been organically affected,” said the head of the research.
The stress of the pandemic appears to have caused organic changes in the brains of at least some teenagers, making some features of them appear more aged than the brains of their peers before Covid-19, a new US scientific study shows.
Previous research has found that anxiety and depression increased during it pandemic in adults compared to previous years. The new findings suggest that the neurological and psychological effects of the pandemic on teenagers may be even worse.
The researchers, led by psychology professor Ian Gottlieb of Stanford University in California, who made the relevant publication in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, studied the brains of 163 children with magnetic resonance imaging before (2016-19) and during the pandemic (2020-22).
“We already knew from other studies that the pandemic has negatively affected the mental health of young people, but we didn’t know to what extent their brains were also organically affected,” said Dr. Gottlieb.
Changes in brain structure occur naturally as we age. During adolescence, children’s bodies experience increased growth in both the hippocampus and amygdala of their brains, while the tissues in their cerebral cortex become thinner.
The new research found that during a pandemic, the above developmental process was accelerated in teenagers, especially during the period of “lockdowns”, resulting in the biological age of the brain showing a more aged image, being relatively inconsistent with the actual age of teenagers. Before the pandemic, this was only observed in children who had experienced chronic problems of violence, parental neglect, family dysfunction or other negative factors.
The study found that, compared to pre-pandemic teens, teens tested during Covid-19 not only had more mental health problems, but also less cortical thickness, greater hippocampal and amygdala volume, and overall older biological age of the brain, by about three years compared to their chronological age.
“It is not yet clear whether these brain changes are permanent. Will their chronological age eventually “catch up” with their brain age? If their brains remain permanently older than their chronological age, it is unclear what the implications will be in the future. “For a 70-year-old or 80-year-old, one would expect to have some cognitive and memory problems based on the changes in their brain, but what does it mean for a 16-year-old’s brain to show premature aging?”, asked the American psychologist.
On the other hand, cognitive neuroscience professor Michael Thomas of Birkbeck University, London, told The Guardian that so far it is difficult to know whether the differences in brain structure mean anything for the current or future behavior of teenagers. He also called it “highly hypothetical that there may be some long-term consequences and whether these brain changes will last or fade away.”
Furthermore, he did not rule out that there may be positive effects, as some of the changes found in the American study in the brains of teenagers during the pandemic are also related to higher performance, e.g. in intelligence tests. As he said, “such data (as from the American study) cannot tell us whether negative long-term effects are inevitable or whether the plasticity of the brain will allow this generation to recover.”
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