The pandemic came like a bolt out of the blue, changing everything.
New research published this week shows that the pandemic also resulted in “unusually accelerated brain maturation in adolescents.”
“We think of the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, senior author of the study and co-director of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, “but we know that it produced other profound changes in our lives, especially for teenagers.”
“Teenagers really are walking a tightrope, trying to get their lives together,” she explained. “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. All teenagers got isolated, but girls suffered more. It affected their brains much more dramatically.”
CNN reports on the study’s findings. Here’s the start of the story:
The pandemic’s effects on teenagers were profound — numerous studies have documented reports of issues with their mental health, social lives and more.
Now, a new study suggests those phenomena caused some adolescents’ brains to age much faster than they normally would — 4.2 years faster in girls and 1.4 years faster in boys on average, according to the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
By being the first to contribute details on aging differences by sex, the study adds to the existing body of knowledge provided by two previous studies on the Covid-19 pandemic and accelerated brain aging among adolescents.
“The findings are an important wake-up call about the fragility of the teenage brain,” said senior study author Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl, the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning and codirector of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, via email. “Teens need our support now more than ever.”
Significant socioemotional development occurs during adolescence, along with substantial changes to brain structure and function. The thickness of the cerebral cortex naturally peaks during childhood, steadily decreases throughout adolescence and continues to decrease through one’s lifespan, the authors wrote.