Covid-19 has led to accelerated brain ageing in teens

The Covid-19 induced pandemic has been hard on everyone worldwide but its effect has perhaps been the worst on teenagers as they couldn’t savour the prime of their life. But that isn’t the worst part either. Experts for the last couple of years have been apprehending that the pandemic had an irreversible toll on both their mental and emotional health. And now, a study that compared brain scans of adolescents from before and after 2020 has proven this apprehension to be a reality. It has revealed that the teenagers who lived through the pandemic now have prematurely aged brains, almost three years older than their real age.  

This was part of the paper published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science and is one of the first research into the impact of the pandemic on teens’ brain development.  

While the research does indicate that the pandemic resulted in poor mental health among teenagers, it sure revealed that stress and anxiety generating from social isolation, hybrid education, financial crisis at home and innumerable death tolls has accelerated brain maturity in the last few years. However, whether this has any long-term impacts on their overall well-being and whether this ageing can be reversed over time still needs to be analysed. But one thing is for sure, the pandemic with its series of side effects have hampered the crucial stage of brain development for teens. Some experts even posit that the pandemic have altered their brain structure forever.  

Sources also cite that teens’ brains have the tendency to adapt to what they do have rather than what they don’t. However, that doesn’t mean they respond well to such socio-economic adversity.  

What’ s interesting is that the roots of this research can be traced back pre-pandemic when a team launched a project to study depression in adolescents with respect to California’s Bay Area. In fact, till date, the people involved in that study have been collecting data about mental health and brain development of new age teens. Recently, this data declared that higher rates of anxiety, stress and depression was noticed in teens within just a year of pandemic. For instance, a part of the brain called hippocampus that is involved with memory and concentration usually thickens during teenage years, but now has matured double. Similarly, amygdala that regulates emotions and cortex that takes care of cognitive functions start thinning, and is now thinner than expected – meaning the maturation process is quicker than usual, adding three to four years to their brains.  

While a lot is still left unclear and needs further analysis, one thing is for sure, the teens are hurting psychologically and emotionally and it should be mitigated at the earliest.