Brain scans suggest an early age adolescent brain in the pandemic

Living through the COVID-19 pandemic can have a brain mature beyond their years.

From online learning and social isolation to financial hardship and electoral death toll, the last few years have been rough on young people. For adolescents, the pandemic and many of its effects came through a crucial window in brain development.

Now, a small study comparing brain scans of young people from before and after 2020 shows that the brains of teenagers who lived through the pandemic will look about three years older than expected, scientists say.

This research was published on December 1 Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Scienceis the first to look at the impact of the pandemic on the aging brain.

The finding indicates that “the pandemic is not bad in terms of adolescent mental health,” says Ian Gotlib, a clinical neuroscientist at Stanford University. “He seems to have changed his mind too.”

The study cannot link those brain changes to mental health during the pandemic. But “we know that there is a relationship between adversity and the brain as it tries to adapt to what it has been given,” says Beatriz Luna, a neuroscientist in cognitive development at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. “I think this study is very important as we look at this as the ball rolling.”

The roots of this study go back to almost a decade ago, when Gotlib and colleagues sent a project to the Bay Area of ​​California to study depression in young adults. The researchers collected information about the mental health of the kids in the classroom, and did MRI scans of their brains.

Lockdown orders in the spring of 2020 forced the researchers to stop the project. When they stopped a year later, Gotlib worried that stress from the pandemic threatened to derail his performance.

It turns out that kids traveling to the study a year after the pandemic reported higher rates of anxiety and depression than their peers from before 2020. So the team decided to compare brain scans taken before the start of the pandemic. with surveys taken between October 2020 and March 2022.

The researchers looked at differences in 64 scans from each group, matched by gender and age of the kids, with an average age of about 16 for each group.

The results were “hitting,” says Gotlib.

The young brain naturally goes through a maturation process that results in the thickening of the hippocampus, an area involved in memory and attention, and the amygdala, which regulates emotional processes. At the same time, the cortex — the area that controls emotional activity — begins to shrink.

Brain scans show that this maturation process has accelerated in adolescents who have lived through the pandemic. Gotlib says their brains appeared to be three to four years older than adolescent brains scanned before the start of the pandemic.

What part of the pandemic informs the teen is uncertain. But “this study shows that the pandemic has had a material impact on brain maturation,” says Joan Luby, a child psychiatrist at the Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis University, who was not involved in the research.

Gotlib suspects stress is to blame. Previous studies have shown that exposure to violence or neglect can lead to brain maturation in children. Considering adolescent mental health has plummeted during the pandemic (SN: 9/8/22), “it is not a big leap” to think that stressful conditions can also be shaped in a cohort of self-study brain development, says Gotlib.

But what the changes are and what their effects are, are still open questions. Rudolf Uher, a neuroscientist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, points out that other factors such as more screen time at school may be at play. And make sure that future research doesn’t reverse the findings of this study.

However, it is uncertain whether the accelerated aging of the brain impacted the teen’s health, or whether the outcome will become apparent later in life. While researchers can’t say for sure, “if your brain is aging prematurely, that’s generally not a good thing,” says Luby.

Either way, making sure people have access to mental health services will be critical to helping children during the pandemic, Gotlib says.

“These kids are hurting,” he said. “We don’t need to take them seriously and give them treatment.”