Chasing Life

The full effects of the Covid-19 pandemic continue to come to light. A recent study found that it actually changed the brains of teenagers.   You all know that I am the father of three teenage girls, so I personally saw what they were going through: concern over the uncertainty of what was happening, on top of a severely reduced social structure due to not being around friends.   Even before the pandemic, researchers had been doing MRI scans on teenage brains every couple of years to try to gain understanding of gender differences in depression among adolescents. When Covid hit, they were able to compare scans of brains before and after the pandemic in order to observe physical changes.   What they found was staggering: The brains aged more quickly. What this means is that the cortex, the outer layer area responsible for executive thinking, got thinner. This typically happens with age, but it seemed to happen much more quickly during the pandemic for these adolescent brains.   Looking deep in the brain, the areas responsible for the ability to regulate emotions also aged more quickly.   The participants reported more severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and what scientists call internalized problems – meaning feelings of sadness, low self-esteem and fear, and trouble regulating their emotions – after the first year of the pandemic.   The hard part is that this pandemic is unprecedented, so we don’t really have a lot to base this research on in terms of what is likely to happen in the future.   What we can say is, the types of changes seen in the brains during that time frame are ones that typically take years and years and are usually associated with what are known as adverse childhood experiences.   We don’t know how long these effects could last and whether some might be reversed, but that’s why it’s important that the researchers continue this study.