MRI data reveal how pandemic-related stress physically aged the brains of teens
Pandemic-related declines in mental health have been well documented since the onset of COVID, but a new study suggests that the stress of the lockdowns that occurred in 2020 might have also physically aged the brains of the teens who endured them.
A new study out of Stanford University analyzed the MRI exams of children before and during the pandemic and found that their brains displayed signs of accelerated aging on imaging, signaling that pandemic-related stress not only impacts mental health, but emotional and physical health as well.
“We already know from global research that the pandemic has adversely affected mental health in youth, but we didn’t know what, if anything, it was doing physically to their brains,” explained the study’s first author Ian Gotlib, the David Starr Jordan Professor of Psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.
The researchers did not originally set out to examine the impact of the pandemic on brains of teens, but after COVID threw a wrench in their prior research on how depression affects adolescents during puberty, the team was unable to conduct the regularly scheduled MRI exams on that group. Nine months after starting that research, the group pivoted to instead study how COVID impacted brain structure in teens.
This included a comparison of MRI scans on 163 children obtained before and during COVID. Through this, experts noted reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampal and amygdala volume and more advanced brain age on the scans obtained during the pandemic in comparison to those completed before.
The experts explained that until now, this sort of growth acceleration in adolescents had only been observed in children who had experienced extreme adversity, such as violence, neglect, family dysfunction, etc.
It remains to be seen whether these changes are permanent or how they might manifest in terms of emotional or behavioral health in the future for the youth involved, the authors suggested.
“Will their chronological age eventually catch up to their ‘brain age’? If their brain remains permanently older than their chronological age, it’s unclear what the outcomes will be in the future,” Gotlib said. “For a 70- or 80-year-old, you’d expect some cognitive and memory problems based on changes in the brain, but what does it mean for a 16-year-old if their brains are aging prematurely?”
These are questions that Gotlib intends to continue to research with the same cohort of children in the long-term.
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The study was published in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.
In addition to her background in journalism, Hannah also has patient-facing experience in clinical settings, having spent more than 12 years working as a registered rad tech. She began covering the medical imaging industry for Innovate Healthcare in 2021.