Covid-related lockdown measures, such as school closures, sports cancellations and stay-at-home orders, prematurely aged adolescent brains by up to four years, researchers at the University of Washington have found.
The new study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is further evidence of how disruptions to daily routines may have contributed to behavioral problems, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. increase in eating disordersanxiety and depression in adolescent girls and boys.
Scientists at the university Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS) began the study using MRI in 2018 to see how the brain structure of 160 Seattle-area teenagers changed over time. The participants, a nearly equal number of boys and girls, were ages 9 to 19 at the start of the study.
Patricia Kuhl, lead researcher and co-director of I-LABS, said that after the Covid lockdowns began in 2020, they were unable to follow up with brain scans until 2021. So they refocused the study to find out how the lockdowns affected the brain structure of adolescents.
By measuring the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of brain tissue that controls high-level brain functions like reasoning and decision-making, they found that the teens’ brains had aged 1.4 years prematurely. Brain scans of the girls showed accelerated aging of 4.2 years, the study said.
The cerebral cortex naturally thins with age. Chronic stress can also cause similar changes in the brain. But over the three-year period between the first scan and the follow-up, the thinning was much greater than the researchers expected.
“As we age, thinning of the cortex is associated with slower processing time, less flexible thinking, all the things we associate with aging,” Kuhl said. “All adolescents in general showed this accelerated aging.”
In adolescent girls, aging is more pronounced. Scans have shown that thinning is widespread throughout the female brain, occurring in 30 regions in both hemispheres and all lobes. In the male brain, thinning is limited to just two regions, both in the occipital lobe, which affects distance and depth perception, face recognition, and memory.
According to Kuhl, this greater influence on girls may be due to differences in the importance of social interaction between girls and boys. Boys tend to get together for sports and physical activity. Adolescent girls may rely on personal relationships for emotional support and personal identity.
“When girls and women are stressed, their natural response is to come together and talk about it, and they release oxytocin and other neurotransmitters that make us feel better,” says Ellen Rome, MD, chief of adolescent medicine at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital. Rome was not involved in the new study.
What…
