Lockdowns during the COVID pandemic may have prematurely aged teenage brains, study finds

Many people experienced disruptions to their daily lives and routines due to stay-at-home orders and limited social interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic, with this being shown to particularly affect the well-being of young people.

Now, a study by researchers at the University of Washington has found that the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused unusual changes in adolescents’ brain development, resulting in accelerated brain maturation.

"We were really surprised to find that in our post-COVID data the cortical thickness was a lot lower than it would be expected from the pre-COVID models, and we found this lower thickness was more pronounced and in a lot more regions in the brain in females than in males," Neva Corrigan, lead author of the study and research scientist at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, told Euronews Health.

Initially, back in 2018, the researchers aimed to track normal brain changes in teenagers as part of a longitudinal study involving 160 participants aged nine to 17.

However, due to the pandemic, follow-up testing was delayed until 2021, prompting the researchers to shift their focus to how the pandemic might have affected brain development instead.

The researchers measured brain maturation by looking at how much the cerebral cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain, thinned over time.

The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By comparing new scans with pre-pandemic data for 80 per cent of participants, they found that the adolescents’ brains thinned faster than expected, particularly for girls.

While this thinning naturally occurs with age, even in young people, girls' brain development accelerated by an