Girls' Brains 'Aged' Dramatically During Lockdown

Adolescents living through COVID-19 lockdowns experienced premature brain aging, with girls especially affected, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Washington launched the research in 2018, aiming to grasp how brain structure changed over time in 160 individuals ages 9 to 19, per NBC News. As COVID-19 spread in 2020, MRIs became all but impossible, so researchers decided to focus on how lockdowns affected adolescent brain structure. When brain scans resumed in 2021, they found boys' brains had prematurely aged 1.4 years, while girls' brains had prematurely aged 4.2 years.

The issue was premature thinning of the cerebral cortex, "the outer layer of tissue in the brain which controls higher level functions of the brain like reasoning and decision-making," per NBC. "As we age, the thinning of the cortex is associated with less fast-processing time, with less flexible thinking, with all of the things that we associate with aging," says Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and lead author of the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "All of the teens in general showed this accelerated aging."

But there were important differences. Boys experienced thinning of the cerebral cortex in two brain regions in the occipital lobe, related to distance and depth perception, face recognition, and memory, whereas girls experienced thinning in 30 brain regions across both hemispheres and all lobes. "We were shocked by these data, that the difference is so dramatic," Kuhl tells the Guardian, noting the finding suggests girls suffered more from the loss of social interaction than boys.

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It's not yet clear how this might affect cognitive performance, but Kuhl says premature cortical thinning could put one at greater risk of neuropsychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, depression, and attention deficit disorders. "Making sure that youth are supported in terms of their mental health is critical, perhaps now more than ever before," says Ian Gotlib, a Stanford University professor of psychology whose previous study compared the thinning of the cerebral cortex in teen brains during the COVID-19 pandemic to changes seen as a result of violence or neglect, per the Guardian. (More COVID-19 stories.)