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According to a new study, pandemic-related stressors have physically aged the brains of adolescents. According to the study, the new findings suggest that the pandemic’s neurological and mental health effects on adolescents may have been even worse. They appear in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.
In 2020 alone, according to the study by Stanford University, US, reports of anxiety and depression in adults rose by more than 25 percent compared to previous years. “We already know from global research that the pandemic has adversely affected mental health in youth, but we didn’t know what, if anything, it was doing physically to their brains,” said first author on the paper, Ian Gotlib, Stanford University. Changes in brain structure occur naturally as we age, Gotlib noted.
During puberty and early adolescence, children’s bodies experience increased growth in the hippocampus and the amygdala, two areas of the brain that control access to specific memories and help to modulate emotions. At the same time, tissues in the cortex, which is involved in executive function, thin.
Gotlib’s study found that the COVID-19 lockdowns accelerated the developmental process in adolescents by comparing MRI scans from a cohort of 163 children taken before and during the pandemic. Until now, he claims, such accelerated changes in “brain age” have only been observed in children who have faced chronic adversity, whether from violence, neglect, family dysfunction, or a combination of factors.
Although those experiences are linked to poor mental health outcomes later in life, it is unclear whether the changes in brain structure that the Stanford team observed are linked to changes in mental health, Gotlib noted.
“It’s also not clear if the changes are permanent,” said Gotlib, who is also the director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology (SNAP) Laboratory at Stanford University. “Will their chronological age eventually catch up to their ‘brain age’? If their brain remains permanently older than their chronological age, it’s unclear what the outcomes will be in the future.
“For a 70- or 80-year-old, you’d expect some cognitive and memory problems based on changes in the brain, but what does it mean for a 16-year-old if their brains are aging prematurely?” said Gotlib. Originally,
Gotlib explained that his study was not intended to investigate the effect of COVID-19 on brain structure. His lab had recruited a cohort of children and adolescents from around the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in a long-term study on depression during puberty prior to the pandemic, but when the pandemic struck, he was unable to conduct regularly scheduled MRI scans on those youth, according to the study. “Then we had a hard restart nine months later,” Gotlib explained.
The study was a year behind schedule once Gotlib was able to continue brain scans from his cohort. Under normal circumstances, statistically correcting for the delay while analyzing the study’s data would be possible – but the pandemic was anything but normal. “That technique only works if you assume the brains of 16-year-olds today are the same as the brains of 16-year-olds before the pandemic with respect to cortical thickness and hippocampal and amygdala volume,” Gotlib said.
“After looking at our data, we realized that they’re not. Compared to adolescents assessed before the pandemic, adolescents assessed after the pandemic shutdowns not only had more severe internalizing mental health problems, but also had reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampal and amygdala volume, and more advanced brain age,” said Gotlib.
These findings could have far-reaching implications for other pandemic-spanning longitudinal studies. If children who survived the pandemic have accelerated brain development, scientists will have to account for that abnormal rate of growth in any future research involving this generation, according to the study.
“The pandemic is a global phenomenon – there’s no one who hasn’t experienced it,” said Gotlib. “There’s no real control group.” These findings might also have serious consequences for an entire generation of adolescents later in life, added co-author Jonas Miller, University of Connecticut, US.”Adolescence is already a period of rapid reorganization in the brain, and it’s already linked to increased rates of mental health problems, depression, and risk-taking behavior,” said Miller.
“Now you have this global event that’s happening, where everyone is experiencing some kind of adversity in the form of disruption to their daily routines – so it might be the case that the brains of kids who are 16 or 17 today are not comparable to those of their counterparts just a few years ago,” said Miller.
Gotlib intends to follow the same group of children through adolescence and young adulthood in the future to see if the COVID pandemic has altered the long-term trajectory of their brain development. Gotlib also intends to monitor these teens’ mental health and compare the brain structure of those infected with the virus to those who were not, with the goal of identifying any subtle differences that may have occurred.
Source:FE
