Covid lockdowns, such as school closures, canceled sports activities and stay-at-home orders, prematurely aged teen brains by as much as four years, researchers from the University of Washington found. The new study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is more evidence of how disruptions to daily routines may have contributed to behavioral problems, an increase in eating disorders , anxiety and depression in adolescent girls and boys . Scientists at the university's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) began the study using MRIs in 2018 to see how the brain structure of 160 teens from the Seattle area developed over time.
The participants, a nearly equal number of boys and girls, ranged in age from 9 to 19 at the start of the study. Lead researcher Patricia Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS, said that after Covid lockdowns began in 2020, they couldn’t do brain scan follow-ups until 2021. So they shifted the focus of the study to learn how the lockdowns had affected adolescent brain structure.
By measuring the thickness of the cerebral cortex — the outer layer of tissue in the brain which controls higher level functions of the brain like reasoning and decision-making — they discovered the brains of teen boys had prematurely aged 1.4 years. The brain scans of the girls showed accelerated aging of 4.
2 years, according to the study. The cerebral cortex naturally thins as we age. Chronic stress can also cause similar changes in the .