Adolescents and young adults were not doing so great before COVID-19. Blame it on social media coupled with safetyism run amok, but mental health problems among this demographic seemed to be on the rise while face-to-face socialization seemed to be down.
To the surprise of no one except maybe our esteemed yet ironically titled public health experts, locking young people in their rooms for extended periods did little to improve things.
Those who came of age during the pandemic were among those whose mental health took the greatest hit during that period. And, if recent reports on the impact of lockdowns on the neurodevelopment of adolescents and young adults hold true, they may be psychologically and cognitively scarred by the experience for years to come.
As the authors of one recent study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences wrote, “Lockdown measures enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in unusually accelerated brain maturation in adolescents.”
According to the trio of University of Washington researchers responsible for the study, this type of abnormality in neurodevelopment is something that “has long been reported to be associated with trauma, abuse, deprivation, and neglect in childhood,” as well as “increased risk for the development of neuropsychiatric and behavioral disorders.”
The participants in the study’s test sample were between 12 and 16 years old when post- or peri-pandemic MRI data were collected from August 2021 to early 2022.
The researchers stated their finding of accelerated brain maturation “was much more pronounced” in girls than in boys. According to their calculations, they wrote, “the age acceleration” was “more than twice as large in females [4.2 years] as in males [1.4 years].”
Specifically, the researchers wrote: “We found accelerated cortical thinning in both the male and female brain. Whereas this thinning was found to be widespread throughout the female brain … we found it to be limited to only two regions in the male brain.”
The neuroanatomical areas to show the greatest cortical thinning in female participants were all associated with social cognition, the researchers noted.
“The fusiform gyrus is key in recognizing and processing faces and facial expressions, allowing for appropriate interactions in a social environment,” they wrote. “The insula plays an essential role in the processing of social and emotional experiences, as well as in empathy and compassion. The superior temporal gyrus plays a key role in language comprehension, which is critical for communication in all settings, including social interactions.”
The regions to show the greatest cortical thinning in males, the authors noted, were the lateral occipital cortices, which they wrote are “involved in processing objects in the visual field but also have been reported to play a significant role in the processing of faces.”
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Social isolation has long been understood to be bad for one’s psychological and physical health, with links to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, and anxiety. With the publication of studies such as this recent report, it looks like abnormal neurodevelopment in the social parts of the brain may potentially be added to the list, although, as the authors note, they did not collect the kind of behavioral data needed to support this assertion fully.
Regardless, one would hope the findings of studies such as this would be taken into consideration the next time our public health experts consider imposing a period of mass confinement.
Daniel Nuccio is a Ph.D. student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.