United States: According to a recent report, where children are among the the ones hardest hit by the Covid pandemic; however, the effects still remain uncertain; teenagers are revealed to be uniquely vulnerable to that social upheaval.
The research suggested that the lockdown made millions of people confined to their homes, making socialization a distant activity.
On top of that, economic setbacks rendered people away from schools, offices, and other social hubs, plunging many into loneliness.
More about the findings
A new study suggested that the pandemic is causing teenagers’ brains to age prematurely, as speeding up of a natural thinning of the cerebral cortex is taking place, which occurs when humans get older.
The effect is seen to be more pronounced in girls.
According to Patricia Kuhl, senior author and co-director at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), “We think of the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis, but we know that it produced other profound changes in our lives, especially for teenagers,” sciencealert.com reported.
More about the study
The new study commenced in 2018 when Kuhl and her colleagues initially planned to perform a longitudinal study of typical changes in developing teen brains.
Where they note that the cerebral cortex in human brains starts thinning as humans age, which takes place even in adolescence.
The thickness could be taken as an indicator of overall brain maturation, as experts noted.
As per the reports, the authors of the study collected MRI data in 2018 from 160 kids, who all belonged to an age bracket of 9 to 17.
They made an effort to collect more data from the same subjects in 2020.
However, the pandemic delayed follow-up tests until 2021. The pre-pandemic data now could reveal how the lockdown might have affected those kids.
What more are the experts stating?
As per Neva Corrigan, lead author, and research scientist at I-LABS, “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,” sciencealert.com reported.
Moreover, “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?” Corrigan added.
As per the researchers, chronic stress, as well as facing hard times, could speed up the thinning of the cerebral cortex, said Corrigan and her colleagues.
Therefore, this process is linked with a heightened risk of developing neuropsychiatric and behavioral disorders, including anxiety and depression.