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Brains of post-pandemic teens show signs of faster ageing
| After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence -- such as thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala -- were greater in the post-lockdown group than in the pre-pandemic group, suggesting such processes had sped up. In other words, their brains had aged faster.
| "Brain age difference was about three years -- we hadn't expected that large an increase given that the lockdown was less than a year long," said Ian Gotlib, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and first author of the study.
Writing in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the team report that the participants originally agreed to take part in a study looking at the impact of early life stress on mental health across puberty.
| As a result, participants were also assessed for symptoms of depression and anxiety. The post-lockdown group self-reported greater mental health difficulties, including more severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and internalizing problems.
"Deterioration in mental health is accompanied by physical changes in the brain for teens, likely due to the stress of the pandemic," said Gotlib.
| "In older adults, these brain changes are often association with reduced cognitive functioning. It's not clear yet what they mean in adolescents. But this is the first demonstration that difficulties in mental health during the pandemic are accompanied by what seem to be stress-related changes in brain structure."
| “Large-scale measures of the brain don’t tell us about the detailed circuits that drive behaviour. I would say it’s very speculative what, if any, long term consequences there will be, and whether these brain changes will be enduring or fade away.”
Thomas also stressed that it was not clear that potential impacts would necessarily be negative, noting some of the accelerated changes reported by the team were also associated with higher performance, such as in intelligence tests.
| https://www.bpsgos.org/article/S2667-1743(22)00142-2/fulltext
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/01/brains-of-post-pandemic-teens-show-signs-of-faster-ageing-study-finds
| So high-risk, high-danger events, such as the threat of death that cannot be easily avoided, combined with financial stress from job loss, emotional distress from the death of family members, and social distress caused by political uncertainty from the elected leadership, can all have an effect on developing brains?
Wow.
It's almost as if living organisms on this planet have evolved to adjust their growth patterns and adaptive strategies in order to ensure survival.
| And if you think this is frightening or disturbing, wait until you take a look at their genetics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3997818/
You aren't going to like what you find out. https://www.research.va.gov/currents/1016-3.cfm
| tl;dr
Is that mean that zoomers are ageing more swifty?
| All my ptsd homies feelin included
| inb4 some libtard uses this as an argument for lowering the age of consent
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| The brains of teenagers who lived through the Covid pandemic show signs of premature aging, research suggests. The researchers compared MRI scans of 81 teens in the US taken before the pandemic, between November 2016 and November 2019, with those of 82 teens collected between October 2020 and March 2022, during the pandemic but after lockdowns were lifted.