Brains of Post-Pandemic Teens Show Signs of Faster Aging, Study Finds 45
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The brains of teenagers who lived through the Covid pandemic show signs of premature aging, research suggests. The researchers compared MRI scans of 81 teens in the US taken before the pandemic, between November 2016 and November 2019, with those of 82 teens collected between October 2020 and March 2022, during the pandemic but after lockdowns were lifted. After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence -- such as thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala -- were greater in the post-lockdown group than in the pre-pandemic group, suggesting such processes had sped up. In other words, their brains had aged faster.
"Brain age difference was about three years -- we hadn't expected that large an increase given that the lockdown was less than a year [long]," said Ian Gotlib, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and first author of the study. Writing in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the team report that the participants -- a representative sample of adolescents in the Bay Area in California -- originally agreed to take part in a study looking at the impact of early life stress on mental health across puberty. As a result, participants were also assessed for symptoms of depression and anxiety. The post-lockdown group self-reported greater mental health difficulties, including more severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and internalizing problems. "Deterioration in mental health is accompanied by physical changes in the brain for teens, likely due to the stress of the pandemic," said Gotlib.
"In older adults, these brain changes are often association with reduced cognitive functioning. It's not clear yet what they mean in adolescents. But this is the first demonstration that difficulties in mental health during the pandemic are accompanied by what seem to be stress-related changes in brain structure."
"Brain age difference was about three years -- we hadn't expected that large an increase given that the lockdown was less than a year [long]," said Ian Gotlib, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and first author of the study. Writing in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the team report that the participants -- a representative sample of adolescents in the Bay Area in California -- originally agreed to take part in a study looking at the impact of early life stress on mental health across puberty. As a result, participants were also assessed for symptoms of depression and anxiety. The post-lockdown group self-reported greater mental health difficulties, including more severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and internalizing problems. "Deterioration in mental health is accompanied by physical changes in the brain for teens, likely due to the stress of the pandemic," said Gotlib.
"In older adults, these brain changes are often association with reduced cognitive functioning. It's not clear yet what they mean in adolescents. But this is the first demonstration that difficulties in mental health during the pandemic are accompanied by what seem to be stress-related changes in brain structure."
Stress (Score:3)
A similar study of teens in the 1930s probably would have shown the same phenomenon. Maybe some events really do make kids grow up faster.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
World War 2.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Typical American response. WW2 and it's significant precursors all began in the 30s. If you were born in the late 20s and came of age by the time of the war, your life involved international depression, the rise of communism and fascism, and a war culminating in the death of nearly 50 million people worldwide. Life was pretty bad for a lot of people before the Nazi invasion of Poland. It just kept getting worse.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh man, your comment and the following "I'm Brazilian" comment just made my day. If you hadnt been such a prick in your own post you wouldnt have looked like such a jackass after theirs.
Re:Stress (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Stress (Score:4, Insightful)
2008 wasn't nearly as bad [britannica.com]. Not sure why you would bring up a relative blip in the historical hardships of human history.
Re: (Score:2)
True. But let's not make this too personal.
Re: (Score:2)
This is just the "starving kids in China" fallacy. Where the argument is that because somebody has it worse nothing should ever be better. Get outta here with that bullshit. If we did it your way nothing would ever get better. Which is likely what you want. That's what being conservative is about these days. Not cautious advances forward but "I'm miserable and so everyone else
Re: (Score:1)
"And thus, lockdowns were to blame!"
"You mean like that month-long period in early 2020?"
"Yes. Well, and they sometimes had to wear masks and stuff after that."
"Nothing else?"
"No, what do you mean?"
"You know, like... a global pandemic itself? People living in fear? Relatives getting sick, put on ventilators and even dying? Infection by virus that causes Long COVID neurological symptoms in like 1 in 5 people it infects and has been associated with various forms of accelerated aging?
"No, no, that had nothing
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
yeah I don't know what GP's talking about, lockdowns lasted more then a year and things are still a bit weird around here...
Re: (Score:1)
2008? What of consequence happened in 2008, because I was right here and paying good attention to the world, and I was unaware of it.
I also note that "COVID 19" is hardly a watershed moment in human history, either, if you ignore the hysterical overreactions to it. A minor epidemic blown into a media circus - 1968 Hong Kong flu was about as bad, no one even noticed it, measles used to kill as many people as "COVID 19" every 2-3 years and people used to go out of their way to expose the
Re: Stress (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe some events really do make kids grow up faster.
*sees how they still act*
Well, at least you didn't use the term mature...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So Lemme Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
So high-risk, high-danger events, such as the threat of death that cannot be easily avoided, combined with financial stress from job loss, emotional distress from the death of family members, and social distress caused by political uncertainty from the elected leadership, can all have an effect on developing brains?
Wow.
It's almost as if living organisms on this planet have evolved to adjust their growth patterns and adaptive strategies in order to ensure survival.
And if you think this is frightening or disturbing, wait until you take a look at their genetics. [nih.gov]
You aren't going to like what you find out. [va.gov]
Re: (Score:1)
You really believe anyone is going to trust a cold fusion link?
Re: (Score:2)
A what???
Those go to va.gov and nih.gov. Where are you getting cold fusion???
Although what's odd is the NIH article would not come up when I was using my VPN. Once I turned it off, it came up.
Re: (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .cfm
I thought this was dead and buried and banished from the Earth? Oh right, Government Operation.
o.O
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
So high-risk, high-danger events, such as the threat of death that cannot be easily avoided, combined with financial stress from job loss, emotional distress from the death of family members, and social distress caused by political uncertainty from the elected leadership, can all have an effect on developing brains?
Americans really would believe anything at all just to fit their own narrative.
If anything, the fear of school shootings is much much more real to teenages than anything covid can scare them, yet no one will talk about gun control because of this.
Re: (Score:2)
You aren't going to like what you find out. [va.gov]
"The daughter of Israeli parents, one of whom was a rabbi, Yehuda grew up in Cleveland with many people who survived Nazi concentration camps. She heard stories of inmates who were tortured and brutally murdered, and she learned of the toll on those who withstood the cruelty."
I'm no psychologist, but I'm willing to bet if you sat a seasoned Chicago beat cop and an Afghanistan war hero down in front of their kids and forced them to start telling gruesome war tales, I'm betting the kids will be just a wee bit fucked up from those "heard stories"
Growing up without a parent lost to war is one thing, but coming home to expose your own children to PTSD-inducing horror? Maybe ignorant parents should stop doing that stupid shit.
I'm not trying to dismiss PTSD at all, and I feel for my
That sound's great! (Score:2)
Considering how people act like children into their 20s and 30s...growing up a little faster might be a good thing.
Brain age (Score:2)
I keeps seeing advertisements on my phone for games that decrease your brain age with only five minutes of playing a day! Obviously the students just need to buy more of those!
Re: (Score:1)
I keeps seeing advertisements on my phone for games that decrease your brain age with only five minutes of playing a day!
Problem is, people play them for much longer than five minutes and have obviously been de-aging their brains back to that of a toddler.
Wait until they admit it's likely due to the virus (Score:2, Interesting)
Covid has already been documented to cause exacerbated brain aging, and not in good ways. It's also well documented at this point to frequently cause damage that is disturbingly similar to various forms of dementia, and may or may not be degenerative.
So let's hope we have enough collective sanity and intelligence left to find a cure for neurodegenerative dementia before so many of us have neurodegenerative dementia that society implodes.
Re: Wait until they admit it's likely due to the v (Score:2)
Re: where are the control groups? (Score:2)
Re: Pandemic and social media (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Vaccination is a generic term that applies to many things. Not all work the same, delivered the same, have the same risks etc.
The best covid vaccines are crazy safe and it's far far more likely other problems just happen to trigger at the same time as getting the shot - or some rare issue is triggered-- when you give a billion+ people the thing it's going to have something for the internet to warp; hell, it can be completely imagined like Q-Anon.
Some vaccinations have bad chemical preservatives some have ot
Not a believable result (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but this result is not believable. Most likely, the person evaluating the images knew what result they wanted, and (intentionally or not) read the images accordingly. When they describe their methodology, there is no indication they they mixed in pre-pandemic images for quality control.
What may also be relevant: these were not just any teenagers, but rather teens with problems in their living situations: participating in a larger longitudinal study assessing the effects of early life stress on psychobiology.
No one saw this coming... (Score:1)
We saved several thousand (maybe even several tens of thousand) lives of people who are mostly going to die in the next few years anyway, and in the process effed up an entire generation of young people with their entire lives ahead of them, tanked our economy, and put a whole lot of people through needless stress and misery.
This is exactly what those of us who were against the lockdowns and school shutdowns predicted.
Was it really worth it?
81 (Score:2)
81. Need I say more?