Teens' Brains Altered by Covid Pandemic, Study Finds

Ian Gotlib of Stanford University said it was already known from global research that mental health in youth has been adversely affected by the pandemic, but it was not clear what it was doing physically to their brains.
Teens' Brains Altered by Covid Pandemic, Study Finds

NEW YORK: The findings in a new study is becoming a cause for concern as it suggested that pandemic-related stress factors have 'physically aged' brains of adolescents. According to the study, the neurological and mental health effects of the pandemic on adolescents may have been even worse than previously thought.

The latest findings have been published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.

According to the study by Stanford University in US, reports of anxiety and depression in adults rose by more than 25 percent in 2020 alone, compared to previous years.

The first author on the paper, Ian Gotlib of Stanford University said it was already known from global research that mental health in youth has been adversely affected by the pandemic, but it was not clear what it was doing physically to their brains.

Gotlib noted that changes in brain structure occur naturally as we age.

Children's bodies during puberty and early teenage years experience increased growth in both the hippocampus and the amygdala, areas of the brain that respectively control access to certain memories and help to modulate emotions. At the same time, tissues in the cortex, an area involved in executive functioning, become thinner.

By comparing MRI scans from a group of 163 children taken before and during the pandemic, Gotlib's study showed that this developmental process sped up in adolescents as they experienced the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Previously, he said, these sorts of accelerated changes in 'brain age' appeared only in children who had experienced chronic adversity, maybe due to violence, neglect, a dysfunctional family, or a combination of multiple factors.

Even though those experiences have been linked to poor mental health outcomes in life later on, it is unclear whether the brain structure changes 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, his study was not designed to look at the impact of COVID-19 on brain structure Gotlib explained.

Before the pandemic, 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 - but he could not conduct regularly-scheduled MRI scans on those youth when the pandemic hit, the study said.

Then, nine months later, Gotlib said they had a hard restart.

Once Gotlib could continue brain scans from his cohort, the study was a year behind schedule. Under normal circumstances, it would be possible to statistically correct for the delay while analyzing the study's data - but the pandemic was far from a normal event.

After looking at the data, they realised that 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.

These findings could have major implications for other longitudinal studies that have spanned the pandemic. If kids who experienced the pandemic show accelerated development in their brains, scientists will have to account for that abnormal rate of growth in any future research involving this generation, said the study.

In the future, Gotlib plans to continue monitoring the same cohort of kids through later adolescence and young adulthood, to track whether the pandemic has changed the trajectory of their brain development over the long term.

Gotlib also plans to track the mental health of these teens, comparing the brain structure of those who got infected with the virus with those not infected, with the objective of identifying any subtle differences that may have occurred.

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