You the effects of the pandemic on teenagers were profound . Numerous studies have documented problems related to mental health, social life and other aspects.
Now, a new study suggests that these phenomena have caused the some teenagers’ brains age much faster than they normally would — 4.2 years faster for girls and 1.4 years faster for boys, on average, according to the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As the first to provide details on sex-related differences in aging, the study adds to existing knowledge provided by two previous studies on the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerated brain aging among adolescents.
“The findings are an important wake-up call about the fragility of the adolescent brain,” said senior study author Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl, director of early learning at the Bezos Family Foundation and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, in an email. “Teenagers need our support now more than ever.”
Significant socioemotional development occurs during adolescence, along with substantial changes in brain structure and function. The thickness of the cerebral cortex naturally peaks during childhood, gradually decreases throughout adolescence, and continues to decline throughout life, the authors wrote.
The researchers originally intended to track the adolescents’ normal brain development over time, starting with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans they performed on participants’ brains in 2018. They planned to do another scan in 2020.
The pandemic delayed the second MRI by three to four years — when the 130 participants, who lived in Washington state and were between the ages of 12 and 20. The authors excluded adolescents who had been diagnosed with a developmental or psychiatric disorder or who were taking psychotropic medications.
The team used the pre-pandemic MRI data to create a “normative model” of how 68 brain regions would likely develop over the course of typical adolescence, so they could compare it to the post-pandemic MRI data and see if it deviated from expectations. This normative model is analogous to the normative growth charts used in pediatric offices to track the height and weight of young children, the authors said.
It has also been used by other researchers to study the effects of circumstances or conditions such as socioeconomic disadvantage, autism, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or traumatic stress.
The study revealed accelerated cortical thinning in the post-pandemic brains of adolescents — occurring in 30 brain regions across both hemispheres and all lobes in girls, and in just two regions in boys. The prevalence of thinning reached 43% and 6% of the brain regions studied for girls and boys, respectively.
The study “is not a major revelation, as the authors acknowledge,” but it adds to our knowledge on the subject, Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a professor of pediatrics and neurology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, said in an email. He was not involved in the research.
How Adversity Influences the Brain
The study has some important limitations, including the fact that senior author Kuhl contributed the study to the journal, meaning she was also an editor on the study and had limited choice over who peer reviewed it.
And because everyone was affected by the pandemic, the authors didn’t have a control group, so they had to use the normative model to approximate what normal controls would be, Wiznitzer said — “which is not as good as real controls, but probably the best they can do.”
The authors also did not have data on the participants’ employment, financial or food security of their families, or on the participants’ exercise, sleep or diet habits, they said. It is also not known whether the participants’ having had Covid-19 could have contributed to the findings.
“Their study is good, but it probably doesn’t have a large enough sample size to say that the sex difference in brain aging is a reliable finding,” Dr. Ian Gotlib, author of a 2022 study on the subject and director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology Laboratory at Stanford University, said in an email.
However, “after reading this paper, we examined the sex differences in the data we used in our study — the same direction as the sex differences reported by the authors, but not statistically significant in our slightly smaller sample,” added Gotlib, who was not involved in the study.
The regions with the greatest acceleration in thinning among girls were associated with social cognitive functions, such as recognizing and processing faces and expressions; processing social and emotional experiences; the ability to empathize and have compassion; and understanding language, the study found. The affected regions in boys’ brains are involved in processing objects in the visual field as well as faces.
Based on previous research, the authors think the findings may be due to a phenomenon known as the “stress acceleration hypothesis.” This hypothesis posits that in a high-stress environment, development may shift toward earlier maturation to protect the brain’s emotional circuits and regions involved in learning and memory — reducing the impact of adversity on structural development.
Correlations between salivary cortisol levels and cortical thickness in the frontal lobe have also been reported among human adults. The sex differences could be due to the varying effects of stressors on boys versus girls, based on what is important to each, the authors said.
What can you do?
Another factor researchers don’t yet know is whether these effects on the brain are permanent, Kuhl said.
“The brain doesn’t recover and thicken, we know that, but one measure of whether teens show recovery after the pandemic ends and social normalcy returns is whether their brains thin more slowly,” Kuhl added. “If that’s the case, we could say that teens’ brains showed some recovery. That’s a study we can actually do in the future.”
Ensuring young people receive support for their mental health is key, Gotlib said. Encourage quality personal time, limit social media use and watch for behavioral changes that reflect a change in mental health or mood so you can intervene as early as possible, Wiznitzer said.
It’s important to recognize that while the “pandemic is largely over,” its effects remain, Gotlib said.
“A full return to ‘normal’ may never occur,” Kuhl said in an email. “These are all potent reminders of human frailty and the importance of investing in the science of prevention and preparedness for the next (inevitable) pandemic.”
See also: Brain seen through world’s best MRI
This content was originally published in Study shows how the pandemic may have affected the brains of teenagers on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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