According to a recent study, Stanford researchers found that the Covid-19 pandemic has been “particularly difficult” for adolescents after more than two years of social isolation during school closures, restrictions and poor access to mental healthcare services. Based on MRI scans of 163 children taken before and after the pandemic, the team observed that the ageing process of their brains accelerated and altered their brain structure far earlier than usual.
These type of accelerated changes in children’s brain structure has previously been found among those who were exposed to violence, neglect, and family dysfunction or upheaval. The accelerated brain maturing includes a reduction in the thickness of the cortex that is responsible for executive functioning skills like planning, paying attention or focusing on tasks, multi-tasking, and remembering instructions.
“As a result of social isolation and distancing during the shut-down, virtually all youth experienced adversity in the form of significant departures from their normal routines,” the researchers wrote in their study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science. “In addition, financial strain, threats to physical health, and exposure to increased familial violence were alarmingly common during the pandemic.”
Out of the 163 participants, 103 were girls. All of them live in the San Francisco Bay Area. After undergoing MRI scans, the researchers invited them for follow-up assessments every two years from November 2016 to November 2019. Their analysis got disrupted in 2020 following the global lockdowns. The researchers then later compared their MRI scans taken both, before and after the pandemic, to analyze how their brain structures got altered in 2020.
“The pandemic has adversely affected the mental health of young people, we found that adolescents assessed during the pandemic have neuroanatomical features that are more typical of individuals who are older or who experienced significant adversity in childhood,” the researchers concluded.
“Compared to carefully matched peers assessed before the pandemic, adolescents assessed during the pandemic had larger bilateral hippocampal and amygdala volumes. Given that volume in these structures typically increases over adolescence, these neural alterations may reflect accelerated brain maturation in the context of the pandemic,” they further added.
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