Governments all over the world imposed stringent measures—like orders to stay at home and the closure of schools—during the COVID-19 pandemic to slow the disease's spread. The disruption of daily routines and social activities has been shown to have a detrimental effect on adolescents' mental health.
The time between childhood and adulthood known as adolescence is characterized by significant shifts in social, behavioral, and emotional development. Additionally, this is the period when self-control, self-confidence, and self-identity are formed. Teenagers' social interaction was decreased by the pandemic, and reports of stress, anxiety, and depression increased, particularly in females.
A recent study from the University of Washington discovered that the pandemic also caused adolescents' brains to mature abnormally quickly. The study was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 9. In girls, this maturation was more noticeable. The mean acceleration was 1.4 years for males and 4.2 years for females when expressed as the number of years of accelerated brain development.
Patricia Kuhl, senior author and co-director of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), stated, "We think of the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis, but we know that it produced other profound changes in our lives, especially for teenagers."
The cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of brain tissue, is used to gauge the maturity of the brain. Even in teenagers, the cerebral cortex naturally thins with age. Adversity and chronic stress have been shown to hasten cortical thinning, which is linked to a higher risk of behavioral and neuropsychiatric disorders. Adolescence is a common time for many of these disorders to manifest, including depression and anxiety, with females being more susceptible.
The goal of the UW research, which started out as a longitudinal study in 2018 with 160 teenagers aged 9 to 17, was to assess how the structure of the brain changed during the course of a typical adolescence.
The pandemic caused the cohort's 2020 return date to be postponed until 2021. By then, it was too late to pursue the original goal of researching typical teen development.
Neva Corrigan, lead author and research scientist at I-LABS, said, "Once the pandemic got going, we started to think about which brain measures would allow us to estimate what the pandemic lockdown had done to the brain." "What did it mean to our teenagers to spend their time at home instead of in their social circles—not hanging out, playing sports, or attending school?"
Researchers developed a model of expected cortical thinning during adolescence using the original 2018 data. The teenagers' brains were then reexamined, and more than 80% of them showed up for the follow-up round of measurements. The teenagers' brains generally displayed an accelerated thinning effect throughout adolescence, but this was significantly more noticeable in the females. In females, the cortical thinning effects were observed in both hemispheres and all lobes of the brain. The effects were limited to the visual cortex in males.
According to Kuhl, the impact on female brains is greater than that on male brains because girls place a different value on social interaction than do boys. She continued by saying that female teenagers frequently place a higher value on their relationships with other girls and prioritize getting together, having conversations, and sharing feelings. Boys often congregate when they want to play sports.
According to Kuhl, "teenagers are really walking a tightrope, trying to get their lives together." "They're facing extreme pressure. Subsequently, a worldwide pandemic occurs, eliminating their typical avenues for relieving stress. Social media has allowed the social pressures and criticisms to persist even though those release outlets have closed. It appears that the pandemic has actually done nothing more than isolate girls. While loneliness struck all teenagers, girls suffered more. Their brains were considerably more severely impacted."
According to Kuhl, there is little chance that the cerebral cortex will thicken once more. However, there is a chance that it will gradually thin out once regular social interactions and outlets resume. To find out if this is the case, more investigation is required. "There's a chance there could be some healing," Kuhl stated. "However, it's also conceivable that these teenagers' brain maturation will continue to be accelerated."
Measures of cognitive brain function, including processing speed and standard task completion ability, are correlated with the degree of cerebral cortex thinned in older populations. Although teens do not currently have access to that type of data, Kuhl noted that this could be the direction of future studies.
According to Kuhl, "the pandemic offered a test case for the fragility of teenagers' brains." "Our findings raise new concerns about what it means to accelerate the aging process of the brain. The most excellent research always poses important new questions, and I believe we have succeeded in doing so here.
Co-author Ariel Rokem is a data science fellow at the eScience Institute and research associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington. The Bezos Family Foundation provided funding for the study.
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