Covid, teenagers ‘older’ after lockdown: the discovery

THE lockdowns imposed during the Covid pandemicwith the obligation to stay at home and the closure of schools, They aged the brains of adolescents prematurely. Social restrictions accelerated their brain maturation, with an average acceleration of 4.2 years in females and 1.4 years in males. It is the discovery of a study by the University of Washington (UW), published in the journal ‘Pnas’ (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and funded by the Bezos Family Foundation established by the parents of the former chairman and CEO of Amazon.

Covid and lockdown, the impact on teenagers

“We think of the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis, but we know it has caused other profound changes in our lives, especially for adolescents,” says Patricia Kuhl, senior author of the study and co-director of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-Labs). It has been well documented that during the SARS-CoV-2 emergency, the disruption of daily routines and social activities has had a negative impact on the mental health of teenagers, increasing anxiety, depression and stress, especially in girls. The new research now adds a new item to the list of “side effects” of the lockdown. The study was started in 2018 on 160 very young people aged 9 to 17, aimed at analyzing the changes that normally occur in the brain structure during adolescence. The scientists had planned to re-evaluate the participants in 2020, but the Covid pandemic delayed the tests until 2021, effectively changing the focus of the research.

Females more affected by aging

“We asked ourselves,” says Neva Corrigan of I-Labs, lead author of the study, “what parameters would allow us to understand the impact of the pandemic lockdown on the brain, what it meant for our teenagers not to go out, to stay at home rather than with friends, at school or playing sports.” So the researchers focused on the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of tissue of the brain, an indicator of the level of brain maturation: the thinner the cortex, the ‘older’ the brain. Based on data collected in 2018, the scientists developed a model of cortical thinning expected in adolescence. But when they re-examined the participants, 80% of whom returned for the 2021 assessments, they observed that their brains had thinned more than expected. In general, but much more markedly in females: the cerebral cortex of girls was thinner everywhere, in all lobes of both hemispheres, while in males the thinning only affected the visual cortex.