Teen brains 'aged' during Covid lockdowns, new research suggests

Like school closures, no sports and activities, and stay-at-home orders, Covid lockdowns stunted the teen brain and had aged it by four years, according to researchers from the University of Washington. 
 
The new study released on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows more how interruptions to the literacy practices may have led to the behavior issues, the rising incidence of eating disorders, anxiety, and depression in adolescent girls and boys. 
 
Researchers at the university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences first initiated the study through MRI scans in 2018 to track changes in the teenagers’ brain structure for the next three years from a group of 160 youths in Seattle. The participants were 48 boys and 53 girls with the age of the beginning of the study 9 to 19. 
 
Lead researcher Patricia Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS, noted that after the Covid lockdowns began in 2020, they could no longer do the brain scan follow-ups until 2021. As a result, they changed the direction of the study to find out how the lockdowns had impacted on the brain development of adolescent patients. 
 
While using the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the tissue in the brain that is responsible for reasoning and decision-making processes among other things, they were able to find out that the brains of teen boys have aged a year ahead than they ought to. 4 years. A research done on the brain scans of the girls revealed that the girls brains had aged four years more than they genetically required. This study was reported to have taken 2 years in completion. 
 
This area of brain also shrinks then later as a normal process of aging, the thickness of cerebral cortex reduces. If the stress is chronic, it can also bring similar changes in the structure of the organ. But overall between the time of the first scan and the follow-up study, there was a lot more thinning in three years than what the researchers thought. 
 
“Age causes the cortex to thin, and to take less fast-processing time, to have less flexible thinking, to have all of what we consider aging,” Kuhl continued. “All of the teens in general went through this premature aging. ” 
 
For teenage girls the aging was more pronounced. Network thinning was identified to be present in thirty distinct regions within the female brain including both the cortical hemisphere and involving all the lobes as seen in the scans. In the case of males the reduction in the thickness was detected only in two Brodmann areas, belonging to the occipital lobe that deals with perspectives depth, faces recognition and memory. 
 
The greater influence on girls could be due to differing significance of social interaction with other individuals in present developmental period for girls and boys, Kuhl said. One of the core reasons is because boys converge for sports and other physical related activities. Such social assets might include personal relationships where adolescent girls seek for emotional support and self-identity. 
 
“When girls and women are stressed there is a natural tendency to have a girls night out talking about it, and we release oxytocin and other neurotransmitters that make feel better said Dr. Ellen Rome a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital. Rome was not involved in the new research. 
 
What does the premature brain aging entail in the daily existence of young people who went through pandemic releations, isolated within their rooms, attending their classes via Zoom or longing for company? 
 
There is a peculiar name, ‘pandemic brains’; are there any negative consequences of that in the long run? 
 
But the study can’t show that the lockdowns led to the brain changes — other issues were already affecting kids’ mental health before Covid. It does imply nevertheless that the reduction of cortical thickness can be linked to the increased levels of anxiety and depression as well as other behavioural disorders, Kuhl noted. 
 
Similar changes of cortical thickness in teen brains were observed in a study conducted in 2022 by researchers at Stanford University during the long Covid restrictions. The Stanford researchers have equated the stress and disruptions precipitated by the pandemic to trauma previously associated with violence, neglect as well as dysfunctional families. 
 
The pandemic was a very stressful period for everyone, including students, Kuhl said. The problem of being home isolated during the period, when young people already go through vast changes in their emotional and behavioral development, was even worse for their psychological well-being. 
 
“The pandemic was dramatic and unexpected, of course, but dramatic and catastrophic in a way not only for a physical wellbeing but for a mental one,” she said. 
 
In youth mental health reports from CDC after year 2021 revealed never before seen rate of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts among teenage girls and boys. In early August a CDC out of survey revealed teen happiness increased slightly but young women in high school still report feeling bad all the time. 
 
Also, in brain development there are critical periods which refers to time when particular kinds of learning are most appropriate was asserted by Dr. Jonathan Posner, the professor of psychiatry in Duke University School of Medicine. For instance it is easier to learn language at the early age than when one is an adult. 
 
‘The teenage years are uniquely critical for development of social skills,’ noted Posner, who was not involved in the new research. “If there are no those interactions possible, there actually is no possibility of having that sort of a social learning. ” 

It is apparent that the cortex does not have capacity to regenerate and progressively gets thinner with advancing age. Kuhl said it is still unknown if the young people’s prematurely aging “pandemic brains” could be vulnerable to disorders like ADHD and depression and potentially, diseases such as Alzheimer and Parkinson. 
 
Seattle-based mother of two, Karin Zaugg Black, is 54 years old and described how her children have fared during well over a year of remote learning due to the pandemic. Her daughter Delia was in seventh grade; Sam her 10-year old son was in fourth grade. 
 
As to me, Delia mentioned that she was losing social contacts a lot, and this was alarming to her. 
 
“If she looks back that time, she was like, ‘Yes, it was so tough,’ you know, ‘I felt like I had no friends and it is tough,’ ” Black recalling her daughter’s experience on the pandemic. 
 
As much as she mentioned, “Their social skills are behind. You know, sort of they lost that ability to navigate in the social world with their peers,” she said. 
 
But the reality is that Delia, being a high school senior, has recovered much of the social interaction skills that were diminished by the pandemic. 
 
According to the specialists, the loss does not have to be long-lasting if the teenagers and young adults’ social experiences and relationships have resumed. 

“As it turns out, kids are very much malleable especially now that we can take them outdoors and try to steer them back on track,” countered Posner. “We also do not wish to act as if this was un-important, for it caused a shift in growth and development.