Scientists find COVID pandemic-related stress has actually aged teenagers' brains

euronews.com:

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only led to poorer mental health among teens - but it has also physically aged their brains.

That’s according to new research from a team at Stanford University in the United States published on Thursday in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.

A growing body of research is showing that the pandemic severely affected the mental health of young people around the world, with lockdowns and school closures taking their toll on children's and teenagers’ emotional well-being.

But these new findings suggest that pandemic-related stressors have not only affected the mental health of adolescents, but they have also physically altered their brains, making their brain structures appear several years older than those of comparable peers before the pandemic.

Researchers compared the MRI scans of 81 teens taken before the pandemic with those of 82 teens taken between October 2020 and March 2022 - during the pandemic but after lockdowns were lifted - in the San Francisco Bay Area, where all the teens were from.

Of these, they matched 64 participants in each group for factors such as age and sex.

They found that, compared to adolescents assessed before the pandemic, those assessed after lockdown not only had more severe internalising mental health problems, but also had reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampal and amygdala volume, and more advanced brain age. In effect, their brains had aged prematurely.

In fact, these post-lockdown adolescents showed neuroanatomical features more typical of older people, or those who had experienced significant adversity in childhood.

As it happens, the team hadn’t originally set out to study how pandemic lockdowns had affected teenagers’ brain structures.

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