he COVID-19 pandemic affected people of all ages and from different walks of life, but just how much did it impact adolescents? In a recent study, a team of researchers found that it could have physically altered teens’ brains.

For his or her study, published Thursday in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the researchers compared the brains of teens before the pandemic (pre-COVID) and after experiencing the pandemic-related shutdowns (peri-COVID).

The researchers weren’t initially aiming to make the comparison, in accordance with the news release from Stanford University. Before the pandemic, the researchers were conducting a longitudinal study on the consequences of youth stress on adolescents within the San Francisco Bay Area, wherein they were invited for assessments every two years.

Nonetheless, the study — similar to most things internationally — got here to a halt when the pandemic hit. As such, the researchers then needed to have a “hard restart,” study first creator, Ian Gotlib of Stanford University, said as per the news release.

This, nevertheless, gave them a novel opportunity to have a look at the impacts of the pandemic on adolescents’ brains.

“(I)t will not be clear whether youth who lived through the pandemic and its shutdowns are comparable psychobiologically to their age- and sex-matched peers assessed before the pandemic,” the researchers wrote.

To search out out, the researchers compared the peri- and pre-COVID participants, matching them “as closely as possible” when it comes to age and sex.

Indeed, they found that the pandemic appeared to have physically altered the adolescents’ brains. Those that experienced the pandemic shutdowns had “reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampal and amygdala volume, and more advanced brain age.”

Their internalizing of mental health problems was also more severe.

Even though it’s quite natural for people’s brains to vary as they age, the outcomes of the scans show that the method appears to have “sped up” in the kids they scanned after the shutdowns. The features in those teens’ brains, researchers say, “are more typical of people who’re older or who experienced significant adversity in childhood.”

In keeping with the researchers, this shows that the pandemic not only affected these young people’s mental health but in addition affected their brain maturation, with the features indicating “older-appearing brains.”

This, they are saying, is something that researchers conducting longitudinal studies halted by the pandemic should want to be aware of.

The query now is whether or not the changes are everlasting or merely temporary, Gotlib said, noting that there is also the query of whether their chronological age will “eventually catch as much as their ‘brain age,'” and the way this may increasingly affect them in the long term.

“(I)t is significant that we proceed to follow and assess individuals who were recruited and assessed prior to the pandemic; one of these research offers the strongest possibility for us to look at the consequences of a significant stressor experienced on a worldwide scale,” the researchers wrote.