Skip to main content

Teen brains aged faster than normal from pandemic stress, study says [washingtonpost.com]

 

By Katherine Reynolds Lewis, Photo: Shutterstock, December 1, 2022

The stress of pandemic lockdowns prematurely aged the brains of teenagers by at least three years and in ways similar to changes observed in children who have faced chronic stress and adversity, a study has found.

The study, published Thursday in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, was the first to compare scans of the physical structures of teenagers’ brains from before and after the pandemic started, and to document significant differences, said Ian Gotlib, lead author on the paper and a psychology professor at Stanford University.

Researchers knew teens had higher “levels of depression, anxiety and fearfulness” than “before the pandemic. But we knew nothing about the effects on their brains,” said Gotlib, who is director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology Laboratory. “We thought there might be effects similar to what you would find with early adversity; we just didn’t realize how strong they’d be.”

[Please click here to read more.]

Add Comment

Comments (0)

Post
Copyright © 2023, PACEsConnection. All rights reserved.
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×