Stressors related to the COVID-19 pandemic have physically altered the brains of adolescents, making their brain structures appear several years older than those comparable before the pandemic, according to a new study from the stanford university.
The text published this December 1 in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, highlights that in 2020 alone, reports of anxiety and depression in adults increased by more than 25 percent compared to previous years. The new findings indicate that the neurological and mental health effects of the pandemic on adolescents may have been even worse.
"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 Marjorie Mhoon Fair professor of psychology at the School of Humanities and Sciences, who is the first author of the article.
Changes in brain structure occur naturally as we age, Gotlib notes, however during puberty and the early teen years, children's bodies experience increased growth in both the hippocampus and amygdala, areas of the brain that respectively control access to certain memories and help modulate emotions. At the same time, tissues in the cortex, an area involved in executive functioning, become thinner.
The study showed that by comparing MRIs of a group of 163 children taken before and during the pandemic, Gotlib's study showed that this developmental process accelerated in adolescents as they experienced COVID-19 lockdowns.
Until now, he says, these kinds of accelerated changes in "brain age" have appeared only in children who have experienced chronic adversity, whether from violence, neglect, family dysfunction, or a combination of multiple factors.
Although those experiences are linked to poor mental health outcomes later in life. Of note, it's not clear whether the changes in brain structure the Stanford team observed are linked to changes in mental health, Gotlib noted.
"It is also not clear whether the changes are permanent," stressed the specialist, who is also director of the Stanford Laboratory of Neurodevelopment, Affect and Psychopathology ?SNAP?.
“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 ages prematurely?
Originally, Gotlib explained, his study was not designed to look at the impact of COVID-19 on the structure of the brain. Before the pandemic, his lab had recruited a group of children and adolescents from across the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in a long-term study on depression during puberty, but when the pandemic hit, he was unable to perform scans. regularly scheduled MRI scans on these young people.
The study was delayed a year. Under normal circumstances, it would be possible to statistically correct for the lag by analyzing the study data, but the pandemic was far from a normal event.
"That technique only works if you assume that the brains of 16-year-olds today 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."
“After looking at our data, we realized that they are not. Compared with adolescents tested before the pandemic and those after the pandemic lockdowns not only had more severe internalized mental health problems, but also had reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampal and amygdala volume and a more advanced brain age.
"The pandemic is a global phenomenon, there is no one who has not experienced it," Gotlib said. "There is no real control group."
These findings could also have serious consequences for an entire generation of adolescents in the future, added co-author Jonas Miller, 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," Miller said. "Now you have this global event going on, where everyone experiences some kind of adversity in the form of disruption to their daily routines, so it could be the case that the brains of kids who are 16 or 17 today are not comparable. to those of their counterparts just a few years ago.”
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