New research reveals how Covid-era lockdowns prematurely aged the brains of teenagers, disproportionately impacting teen girls and raising concerns about long-term harm among a generation of young people.
In the study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers measured the thickness of the cerebral cortex in teenagers, comparing results to measurements taken of the same cohort prior to the pandemic to see how lockdown impacted developing brains. The brains of teenage boys, they discovered, prematurely aged 1.4 years while those of teen girls prematurely aged 4.2 years. Such accelerated maturation raised concerns about the impact on mental health and learning ability.
“We were shocked by these data, that the difference is so dramatic,” Patricia Kuhl, professor and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, told the Guardian.
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MRI scans from 160 children aged 9 to 17, gathered in 2018, were used to create a model of how the brain’s cortex normally thins during school years. Some thinning is both normal and beneficial, allowing for specialisation and maturation during adolescence.
But when researchers revisited the same cohort in 2021 and 2022, post-lockdowns, the scans collected from those aged 12 to 16 showed accelerated cortical thinning – in one area for boys, and for 30 of the girls, across both hemispheres and all lobes.
Both boys and girls showed signs of accelerated ageing in areas of the brain linked to vision, which might impact the processing of faces. Girls, however, saw far more widespread ageing, including in areas underpinning social cognition with roles in processing emotions, interpreting facial expression and language comprehension – all critical to communication, according to researchers.
Kuhl told The Guardian that the difference is likely due to girls’ greater reliance on social connections “for their well-being and for their healthy neural, physical and emotional development.”
While more studies are needed to determine what long-term impacts will arise from premature thinning, which has previously been linked to behavioural and neuropsychiatric disorders, as well as difficulty learning, experts say that there is space to intervene.
“Making sure that youth are supported in terms of their mental health is critical,” Ian Gotlib, a psychology professor at Stanford University who has conducted similar research, told the Guardian. Kuhl agreed and encouraged parents to talk to their children about their experiences of the pandemic.
