Study reveals lockdown may have caused alarming changes to teenagers' brains

The Covid-19 lockdown may have changed teenagers’ brains and caused them to age prematurely, a study has found.

Declared in 2020, the Covid pandemic was a uniquely stressful and uncertain time for much of the planet. But for teens, the lockdown potentially had a physical impact on their brain structures.

Between 2020 and 2021, many places around the world were placed under restrictive measures introduced to curb the spread of the virus. The measures limited the amount of face-to-face interaction we could have, which has now proven to have been particularly harmful for teens who rely on it to develop a sense of identity.

Experts at the University of Washington were undertaking a long-term study to evaluate changes in the brain structure of young people during typical adolescence

They looked at 160 teenagers between the ages of nine and 17 and were particularly interested in the changes that occurred to the outer layer of the brain – the cerebral cortex – which experts understand gets thinner as we age and is accelerated with chronic stress and life events, particularly in girls.

Then, the pandemic struck.

“Once the pandemic was underway, we started to think about which brain measures would allow us to estimate what the pandemic lockdown had done to the brain,” said Neva Corrigan, lead author of the study and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), in a statement.

“What did it mean for our teens to be at home rather than in their social groups – not at school, not playing sports, not hanging out?”

Using 2018 data of the teens’ brains, the team created a model that would show the typical development of cortex thinning they might usually experience.

But when the teens were tested in 2021, on average, their brains showed significantly accelerated cortical thinning, especially among girls. While boys experienced it only within the visual cortex, girls experienced it all over their brains.

Experts have predicted this could be down to the differences in the way in which teenage girls and teenage boys interact, as well as how they feel societal stress from things like social media.

Patricia Kuhl, senior author of the study and co-director I-LABS, said: “Teenagers really are walking a tightrope, trying to get their lives together.”

“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,” she added. “All teenagers got isolated, but girls suffered more. It affected their brains much more dramatically.”

But, other experts in the field have urged against putting it completely down to lockdown and highlighted some limitations of the study.

Richard Bethlehem, an assistant professor of neuroinformatics at the University of Cambridge, said: “Firstly, the samples are quite small, so we need to be cautious not to generalise these findings to all adolescents.

“Secondly, there is not a huge amount of information about these samples beyond the fact that they were collected at different times during the pandemic so we cannot assume it definitely is the lockdown which is the cause of these reported changes in the brain.

“For example, many other things may have happened during the pandemic period such as infection with covid or a number of infections. There are many factors that are not modelled or documented in this paper which could potentially explain these findings beyond the lockdowns themselves.”

Sign up for our free indy100 weekly newsletter

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings