The COVID-19 pandemic may have aged teens’ brains beyond their years.
The past few years have been rough on students. They’ve endured online schooling, social isolation, family hardships and news of a mounting global death toll. For teens, the virus and its many social side effects arrived during a crucial window in their brain’s maturation.
Now, a small study finds that the brains of teens who have been living through all this look about three years older than expected. This research is the first to look for impacts of the pandemic on brain aging. The new findings emerged by comparing brain scans taken from kids before the pandemic to those taken from different teens after 2020.
The new data show that for teens, “the pandemic hasn’t been bad just in terms of mental health,” says Ian Gotlib. “It seems to have altered their brains as well.” Gotlib is a neuroscientist who led the study. He works at Stanford University in California. His team shared its findings December 1 in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.
Beatriz Luna did not take part in the new study. But as a developmental neuroscientist, she’s familiar with this period of brain changes. Luna works at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. She says the new study did not link the brain changes it found to poor mental health during the pandemic. (In fact, it didn’t explore those questions.) But, she adds, “we know there is a relationship between adversity and the brain.” Our mind will try “to adapt to what it’s been given,” she notes. To her, the new work “is a very important study that sets the ball rolling for us to look at this.”
Ongoing study was poised to see ‘striking’ changes
The…
Read the full article here