Brains of post-pandemic teens show signs of faster ageing, study finds

There are signs of premature aging in the brains of teenagers who lived through the Covid epidemic.

Between November 2016 and November 2019, the researchers compared the scans of 81 teens in the US taken before the Pandemic and the ones taken between October 2020 and March 2022.

After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence were more pronounced in the post-lockdown group than in the pre-pand group. Their brains were getting older faster.

Ian Gotlib, the first author of the study, said that the brain age difference was about three years.

A group of adolescents in the Bay Area agreed to take part in a study looking at the impact of early life stress on mental health. Participants were assessed for depression and anxiety.

More severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and internalising problems were reported by the postlockdown group.

The study suggests that covid may have changed people's personality.

Gotlib said the findings were in line with what other researchers were studying. The stress of the Pandemic may cause physical changes in the brain for teens.

It's not clear if the poorer mental health captured in the study is driven by faster brain aging or if it's bad news for teens.

Gotlib said that they don't know if the changes will persist or if they will diminish with time.

Brain changes in older adults are associated with less cognitive functioning. They don't know what they mean in adolescents. This is the first time that stress-related changes in brain structure have been shown to correlate with difficulties in mental health during the Pandemic.

Michael Thomas, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Birkbeck University of London, who was not involved in the study, said the research confirmed the struggles that teenagers in particular experienced during the Pandemic. He said it was difficult to know what differences in the size of the brain meant.

The large-scale measures of the brain don't tell us much about the circuits that drive behavior. I don't know what the long term consequences will be and whether the brain changes will last.

Thomas said that it was not clear if the potential impacts would be negative, as some of the changes reported by the team were associated with higher performance.

He said that London taxi drivers had bigger hippocampuses. The data shows that the Pandemic may have had profound effects on teenagers, but they can't tell us if the brain will allow this generation or not.