Teenagers who lived through the Covid lockdown seem to have prematurely aged brains – with research finding that their brains were more typical of individuals who were older or who had experienced ‘significant adversity’.
The researchers looked at MRI scans of 82 teens in the US which were performed between October 2020 and March 2022 during the lockdowns – and compared them to MRIs of 81 teens between November 2016 and November 2019.
Writing in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the researchers said: “We found that adolescents assessed during the pandemic have neuroanatomical features that are more typical of individuals who are older or who experienced significant adversity in childhood.”
The adolescents who had lived through lockdown had “older appearing brains”,
Comparing the two groups of teenagers, the team matched 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex. They found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence, thinning of the cortex, for example, and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala, were greater in the post-lockdown group. The processes seemed to have sped up – ageing the brain faster.
“Brain age difference was about three years – we hadn’t expected that large an increase given that the lockdown was less than a year [long],” said Ian Gotlib, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and first author of the study, told the Guardian.
“It appears, therefore, that the pandemic not only has adversely affected adolescents’ mental health, but also has accelerated their brain maturation,” the study concluded.
The teens who experienced lockdown also reported more severe mental health problems including more sever symptoms of anxiety, depression and internalising problems.
Gotlib told the Guardian that “the findings chimed with those from other researchers studying the impact of the pandemic on teens’ mental health”.
“Deterioration in mental health is accompanied by physical changes in the brain for teens, likely due to the stress of the pandemic,” he said.
Researchers are not sure yet of the implications for the teenagers who lived through the Covid lockdowns.
“We don’t know that yet – we are starting to rescan all of the participants at age 20, so we’ll have a better sense of whether these changes persist or start to diminish with time,” Gotlib said.
Last week, new data suggested that one in four young people who spent their adolescence in Covid lockdown now has a mental health disorder.
The figure has risen from one in six in just one year, the Telegraph reported.
“Experts said the crisis had now become “a national emergency” – saying that Britain’s response to Covid had caused a profound “shock to the system” of young people at a formative age” the paper said, noting that before the Covid crisis, one in ten young people aged 17 to 19 was classed as having a “probable mental disorder”.
“Last year it rose to one in six, with latest data for 2022 showing a figure of one in four,” it found.