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Teenager’s Facing Unusual Ageing Of Brain As An Impact Of COVID-19 Pandemic

Dec, 2022 - By WMR

The healthy development of brain parts, the amygdala and the hippocampus in early adolescent has been accelerated due to stress built up during pandemic.

The devastation caused by the Covid-19 epidemic has affected every element of people's lives. Another worrisome conclusion from a new study has added to the list of harmful consequences produced by the deadly coronavirus.

The investigation, released on Thursday in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, discovered that pandemic lockdown anxiety impacted youngsters' brains to age three years faster. These effects are comparable to those reported in children who have been subjected to pro-longed stress and trauma.

Childhood trauma can raise the risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other long-term detrimental impacts, as well as make people more prone to mental illnesses such as addiction, depression, anxiety, and depression. Based on these findings, it is clear that the early ageing process of children's brains is a harmful trend.

"We discovered that kids examined after the pandemic shutdowns had more extreme internalizing mental health issues, lower cortical thickness, bigger hippocampus and amygdala sizes, and more advanced brain age," the researchers said.

"As a result, not just does the Covid-19 pandemic seem to have resulted in worse mental health and hastened brain ageing in teenagers, but it also provides major hurdles to researchers assessing data from pandemic-interrupted longitudinal studies of normal development."

As per CNN, Ian Gotlib, the study's principal author, stated that the research team expected to identify issues with anxiety, despair, and internalized concerns.

"The epidemic has not been friendly to teenage mental wellbeing," said Gotlib, a Stanford University psychology professor.

However, they were unsure what the MRI scans would reveal.

"Doing research this way when not sure what's going to unfold is always exciting," Gotlib said. "These effects were fascinating and occurred swiftly.

"This was only a one-year shutdown, so we didn't expect the consequences on the brain to be this severe after such a short time of stress," he noted. "It corresponds to the mental health issues that we're witnessing."