The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.
Being a teen during the first part of the COVID pandemic meant experiencing many milestones—the first day of high school, birthdays, graduation—from behind a computer screen.
Pandemic isolation had a marked effect on young people. But a recent University of Washington study found teen girls were more adversely affected by the lockdown than teen boys, with girls' brains aging more than three times as much.
Researchers say it's not entirely clear what that could mean long-term for people who were teens during the early part of the pandemic. But in the immediate future, it could make teen girls more susceptible to anxiety and depression.
Neva Corrigan, the lead researcher on the study, said it highlights the need for more mental health support.
In 2018, researchers at UW's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences studied the brain scans of 160 people ages 9 to 17 with the intention of looking at changes in their brains over a two-year period. When the pandemic hit, they had to wait an extra year to bring their subjects back.
About 130 of them came back for the second scan. The researchers used the data of about 110 people from the original group to create a model, projecting what expected brain development would look like. They used the data from about 50 other students in that group to look at how their brains had actually changed in those three years.
What they found surprised them. Between 2018 and 2021, the teen girls in the study experienced more thinning of their frontal cortices—indicating aging in the brain. They found teen girls' brains aged 4.2 years beyond the predicted rate, whereas teen boys' brains aged 1.2 years more than expected.
The areas where girls' brains showed the most cortical thinning was in the part of the brain associated with social interactions, Corrigan said.
"We know that during the teen years, girls use their social network a lot to help deal with emotions and stressors," Corrigan said. "During COVID, they lost that emotional support avenue, and males may not use that as much."
Corrigan also acknowledged that while the study showed changes during this time period, researchers couldn't pinpoint the exact aspects of the lockdown that caused those changes. Researchers hypothesized it was because of the stress, she said, based on previous research about how chronic stress affects the brain.
"This study highlights the importance of social interaction for teenagers," Corrigan said. "Adults should be fostering and helping teens make these connections. I know it might not be fun for parents when their kids are spending all their time with their friends, but those interactions are very critical to their teens' development."
Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-pandemic-affected-teen-boys-girls.html
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