WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A recent suggested that restrictive measures taken during the pandemic might have caused teenagers' brains to age prematurely, with girls aging 4.2 years faster and boys aging 1.4 years faster on average.
'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,' said Patricia Kuhl, senior author of the study and co-director of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.
The study, led by Kuhl and her colleagues at the University of Washington, involved 160 teenagers between the ages of 9 and 17. The researchers gathered MRI scans of the participants in 2018 to evaluate their brain structures before the pandemic.
'Once the pandemic was underway, we started to think about which brain measures would allow us to estimate what the pandemic lockdown had done to the brain,' lead author Neva Corrigan said. 'What did it mean for our teens to be at home rather than in their social groups-not at school, not playing sports, not hanging out?'
After lockdowns, the team again approached the same participants to collect their MRI scans, which revealed signs of accelerated cortical thinning in one area of the boys' brains, and in 30 of the girls' brains, across both hemispheres and all lobes.
The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlighted several changes in girls' brains, especially in areas related to social cognition with roles in processing emotions, interpreting facial expressions and language comprehension.
'Teenagers really are walking a tightrope, trying to get their lives together,' Kuhl said. 'They're under tremendous pressure. Then a global pandemic strikes, and their normal channels of stress release are gone. Those release outlets aren't there anymore, but the social criticisms and pressures remain because of social media.'
'What the pandemic really seems to have done is to isolate girls,' she concluded. 'All teenagers got isolated, but girls suffered more. It affected their brains much more dramatically.'
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