A recently published study found that the COVID-19 pandemic left potentially serious scars on the brains of adolescents.
A group of scientists who were conducting long-term research on depression in puberty, obtained worrisome results Over the effects of the pandemic on the brains of adolescents. And it is that factors such as stress caused by confinement made this organ age a few more years.
As the study explains Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Mental Health and Brain Maturation in Adolescents published December 1, 2022 in the magazine Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, these accelerated changes in aging had only been seen in children who had experienced rejection, violence, or family dysfunction.
What happened to the adolescent brain during the COVID pandemic?
“During puberty and early adolescence, the young body experiences growth in both the hippocampus and the amygdala, brain regions that respectively control access to certain memories and modulate emotions. At the same time, the tissue of the cortex, a region involved in executive functioning, becomes thinner,” says an article from UNAM.
After analyzing magnetic resonance images of a group of 163 children and adolescents taken before and during the pandemic, the researchers discovered that this process accelerated while they were confined by COVID-19.
Still it is not clear if these changes will be permanent or if at some point your chronological age will sync up with that of your aging brain. It is also not known what the results will be in the future, whether these adolescents will be more prone to cognitive decline or other mental health problems, but it is possible that there will be serious consequences in the late age of an entire generation of adolescents.
Ian Gotlib, professor of psychology at Stanford University’s School of Sciences and Humanities and lead author of the study, will follow the group of youngsters into adulthood to discover the long-term effects of these brain changes, he also plans to monitor their mental health status and compare the brain structure of those infected with COVID-19 with that of the uninfected to find differences.
