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The stress of COVID-19 lockdowns caused lasting changes to the brains of teenagers, a new study reveals.
The study, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, found that the pandemic had long-term effects on teenagers and stress-related biological systems in their bodies.
As PsyPostreports, “Previous studies have shown that early life stress can disrupt the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, increase inflammation, and alter brain development—effects that raise long-term risks for poor mental and physical health. In this context, the researchers aimed to investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic had measurable effects on these same biological systems.”
The study drew on a long-term study being conducted since 2013 at Stanford University. The researchers took cohorts of hundreds of teenagers from before and during the pandemic.
“To assess stress physiology, participants provided saliva samples four times per day across two days. These samples were used to calculate total daily cortisol output, as well as the cortisol awakening response (CAR), which reflects the sharp increase in cortisol shortly after waking. Systemic inflammation was assessed via dried blood spots analyzed for CRP levels. Brain function was measured using fMRI while participants completed two tasks: a monetary incentive task that probes reward processing, and an affect labeling task that taps into implicit emotion regulation.”
Teenagers assessed during the pandemic showed marked differences from teenagers assessed before. Teenagers assessed during the pandemic showed changes associated with chronic stress and prolonged exposure to adversity, as well as chronic systemic inflammation and reduced activation in areas of the brain associated with reward behaviour, emotional regulation and motivation.
“Our findings indicate that teens went through a profoundly stressful period during the pandemic, and it appears to have adversely affected their biological functioning, including the development of their brain, HPA axis, and immune systems,” one of the researchers told PsyPost.
“We were surprised by how much the teens who experienced the COVID-19 lockdowns looked biologically like people who have been exposed to significant early life stress or trauma. These traumatic experiences (also referred to as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs) can have a lasting impact on the body and brain. It was striking to us that youth who experienced the pandemic lockdowns, which spanned a relatively short timeframe, had similar patterns of biological functioning as people exposed to early life stress.”
The findings clearly suggest adolescents experienced changes to their psychological development that are likely to mark their lives for years to come. Only one of the teenagers studied actually suffered from COVID019, so the effects were clearly associated with the social measures implemented by governments and not the virus itself.
