The covid pandemic has had a strong impact not only on our physical health, but also on our mental health: social distancing, lockdown and fear of the virus have contributed to increasing anxiety and psychological disorders, especially among teenagers. A new study from Stanford University, published in Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science and conducted on 163 boys, shows that covid may have physically modified the brains of the youngest, causing them to age prematurely.
Premature ageing. During puberty and early adolescence, both the hippocampus and amygdala grow, two regions of the brain that control access to memories and help modulate emotions, respectively. At the same time, the tissues of the cerebral cortex begin to thin.
In the boys involved in the research, whose brain was photographed by an magnetic resonance before and after the pandemic, these processes were accelerated: up to now these rapid changes had only been found in boys who had suffered violence in the family, who had been abandoned, had lived in dysfunctional families or had other serious problems.
Permanent changes? “We don’t know if these variations in brain structure are connected to changes in mental health, or even if they are permanent,” underlines Ian Gotlib, research coordinator, who wonders if the chronological age of those who were teenagers in the pandemic will ever return to correspond to the mental one.
What is certain is that, compared to the adolescents analyzed before the pandemic, those analyzed after not only had severe mental health problems, but also had thinner cortical tissue, a greater volume of the hippocampus and amygdala and, overall , a more advanced mental age.
Next steps. “Adolescence itself is a period of rapid brain reorganization, associated with an increase in mental health problems, depression and risky behaviors,” says Jonas Miller, one of the authors. The next step in understanding whether the signs left by the pandemic will be permanent is to continue following the group of young people analyzed in the study, going deeper into the matter and comparing the brain structure of those who have been infected and those who have not.