The COVID-19 pandemic has had a high emotional and psychological cost, as different studies have already shown. In fact, cases of anxiety and depression in adults increased more than 25% during 2020 alone, compared to previous years. New research has found that pandemic stress has physically altered the brains of adolescents, making their brain structures appear several years older than their pre-pandemic peers.
The study has been carried out by researchers at Stanford University and suggests that stressors associated with the pandemic may have had important neurological and mental health effects on adolescents. Their results have been published in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science. “We already know from global research that the pandemic has negatively affected the mental health of young people, but we didn’t know what, if anything, it was physically doing to their brains,” said Ian Gotlib, the David Starr Jordan Professor of Psychology at the School of Humanities and Sciences and first author of the article.
Changes in the structure of the brain occur as we age, Gotlib explains, and during puberty and the early teen years children experience increased growth in both the hippocampus and the amygdala—regions of the brain that control access to certain memories and help modulate emotions, respectively, while the tissues of the cortex, an area involved in executive functioning, become thinner.
“Adolescents assessed after lockdowns had more severe mental health problems and reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampus and amygdala, and older brain age”
The researchers compared MRIs of a group of 163 children taken before and during the pandemic, finding that this developmental process accelerated in adolescents as they experienced COVID-19 lockdowns. Gotib explains that until now these types of accelerated changes in “brain age” have only been found in children who have suffered chronic adversity from violence, neglect, family dysfunction, or a combination of different factors, and although those experiences are related to mental health problems later in life, it’s unclear whether the changes in brain structure observed by the Stanford scientists are linked to changes in mental health, according to Gotlib.
A brain aged prematurely by pandemic stress
“It is also not clear whether the changes are permanent,” Gotlib said. “Will your chronological age eventually catch up with your ‘brain age’? If your brain remains permanently older than your chronological age, it’s unclear what the results will be in the future. For a 70 or 80 year old you would expect some cognitive and memory problems based on changes in the brain, but what does it mean for a 16 year old if their brain is aging prematurely?
Gotlib has explained that the objective of his study was not to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the structure of the brain, but that before the pandemic his laboratory had recruited a cohort of children and adolescents from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. Francisco to participate in a long-term study on depression during puberty, but when the pandemic hit it was not possible to perform regularly scheduled MRIs on these young people. “Then nine months later, we had a full reset,” Gotlib continues.
When they were able to continue with the brain scans, the study was pushed back a year. Under normal circumstances, it would be possible to statistically correct for the lag when analyzing the study data, but the pandemic caused difficulties. “That technique only works if you assume that the brains of today’s 16-year-olds are the same as the brains of 16-year-olds before the pandemic with respect to cortical thickness and volume of the hippocampus and amygdala,” Gotlib explained. “After looking at our data, we realized that they are not. Compared with adolescents evaluated before the pandemic, adolescents evaluated after the pandemic lockdowns not only had more severe internalized mental health problems, but also had reduced cortical thickness, a larger hippocampus and amygdala, and an older age. more advanced brain.
The findings could have serious consequences for an entire generation of adolescents in the future, added Jonas Miller, a co-author of the paper who was a postdoctoral fellow in Gotlib’s lab during the study. “Adolescence is already a period of rapid reorganization in the brain, and it is already linked to increased rates of mental health problems, depression, and risk behaviors.” “Now you have this global event going on, where everyone experiences some sort of adversity in the form of disruption to their daily routines, so it could be that the brains of kids who are 16 or 17 today are not comparable to those of their counterparts just a few years ago”, he concludes.
Gotlib intends to continue to follow the same group of children through adolescence and early adulthood, to see if the COVID pandemic has changed the trajectory of their brain development in the long term, in addition to tracking their mental health. of these adolescents and compare the brain structure of those who were infected with the coronavirus with those who were not to identify any differences that may have occurred.
.
