The study cited new findings suggesting that the neurological and mental health effects of the pandemic on adolescents may be worse.
Image Credit source: freepik
Due to the stress caused by the pandemic, teenagers are now thinking like adults, which can have serious consequences in the future. A new study says that due to these stresses teenage children His fickleness was taken away from him. Children have now started thinking more like adults. The study cited new findings suggesting that the neurological and mental health effects of the pandemic on adolescents may be worse. They have been published in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science Journal.
What came out in the study?
According to a study by Stanford University of America, in 2020 alone, reports of anxiety and depression among adults have increased by more than 25 percent compared to previous years. In this regard, Ian Gottlieb, author of the research paper, said that we are already We know from global research that the pandemic has adversely affected the mental health of the youth. But we didn’t know if there was an effect or how much the pandemic had physically affected their brains.
Gottlieb said that as we age, changes in the structure of the brain occur naturally. During early adolescence, children’s bodies experience growth in both the hippocampus and the amygdala (regions of the brain that control access to certain memories and help organize emotions, respectively). At the same time, the tissues in the cortex become thinner.
The growth process of teenagers is accelerated
Gottlieb’s study, comparing MRI scans of a group of 163 children taken before and during the pandemic, found that the experience of lockdown accelerated this process of development in adolescents. Such rapid changes have been observed only in children who have been exposed to adversity for a long time. Be it violence, neglect, family problems or any other such reason.
These experiences are linked to poorer mental health outcomes later in life, Gottlieb said, but it’s not clear whether the changes in brain structure that the Stanford team observed are linked to changes in mental health. Not that the changes are permanent. Gottlieb is also the director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect and Psychopathology (SNAP) Laboratory at Stanford University.
What will be the result in future?
Will his chronological age eventually catch up to his ‘brain age’, he said? If their brain is permanently older than their chronological age, it is unclear what the consequences will be in the future. For a 70 or 80 year old person, you would expect some cognitive and memory problems based on changes in the brain, but what does it mean for a 16 year old if their brain is aging prematurely.
Gottlieb explained that originally their study was not designed to look at the effect of COVID-19 on brain structure. Before the pandemic, his lab recruited a group of children and teens from around the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in a long-term study on depression—but when the pandemic hit, he couldn’t get the regularly scheduled MRI scans. .
Problems encountered in children
Gottlieb said this technique only works if you consider that the brains of 16-year-olds are similar to the brains of 16-year-olds before the pandemic with respect to cortical thickness, hippocampus and amygdala volume. He explained that our data After looking at it, we realized that it is not so. Adolescents assessed after the pandemic not only had more severe internal mental health problems, but also had reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampus and amygdala, compared to adolescents assessed before the pandemic.
can have serious consequences
Co-author Jonas Miller from the University of Connecticut in the US said these findings could have serious consequences for a whole generation of adolescents in later life. Adolescence is already a period of rapid change in the brain, Miller said. It has already been linked to increased rates of mental health problems, depression and risk behaviours. Children who have experienced the pandemic, the study said. If rapid brain growth is on the mind, scientists will need to account for the abnormal rate of growth in any future research involving this generation.
Source: www.tv9hindi.com”