New Study implies that brains of American teenagers have physically changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, aging faster than normal.
The study was published on Thursday in the journal Biological Psychiatry, is one of the first to look specifically into physical changes of the brain brought about by stress and anxiety.
The teenagers who participated in the study also portrayed severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and what scientists call internalized problems such as feelings of sadness, low self-esteem and fear and trouble regulating their emotions – after the first year of the pandemic.
The research comes out of a larger study in which scientists were trying to understand the gender differences in depression among adolescents.
Eight years ago, they set out with a plan to take MRI scans of 220 children ages 9 to 13 every two years. The team had completed two sets of scans when the pandemic interrupted their research, and they weren’t able to start scanning again until the end of 2020.
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The covid 19 pandemic caused a lot of loss, whereby parents lost jobs, families broke up, children lost their parents, which led to stress, anxiety and depression among the most affected.
The researchers compared the MRI scans of 128 children. Half the scans were taken before the pandemic and the other half at the end of 2020.
They found that the children who had lived through the first year of the pandemic had brain ages that were older than their chronological age.
The brains that had gone through the beginning of the pandemic had growth in the area that can help regulate fear and stress, called the amygdala, and in the hippocampus, the area of the brain that can controls access to memories. Tissues had thinned in the part of the brain that controls executive functioning, the cortex.
Ian Gotlib, lead author of the new study, said the research team had expected to find the problems with anxiety, depression and internalized problems.
“The pandemic has not been kind to adolescent mental health,”
“It’s always interesting to do research like this when you’re not really sure what’s going to happen,”
“This was just a one-year shutdown, so we didn’t know that the effects on the brain would be this pronounced after that short a period of stress,”
“It tracks with the mental health difficulties that we’re seeing.” Said Gotlib a Professor at Stanford.
Gotlib hopes parents and guardians keep in mind that although lockdowns and school closures may be over, the mental health consequences may be lingering.