Study: The pandemic has aged the brains of teenagers

The stress of living through the pandemic physically changed adolescents' brains and prematurely aged them by at least three or four years. That’s the finding of a new study out of Stanford University. If kids who experienced the pandemic show accelerated development in their brains, scientists say they will have to account for that abnormal rate of growth in any future research involving this generation. 

Study co-author Jonas Miller said, “Adolescence is already a period of rapid reorganization in the brain, and it’s already linked to increased rates of mental health problems, depression, and risk-taking behavior. Now you have this global event that’s happening, where everyone is experiencing some kind of adversity in the form of disruption to their daily routines – so it might be the case that the brains of kids who are 16 or 17 today are not comparable to those of their counterparts just a few years ago.”

Details are in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science