Covid lockdowns prematurely aged girls’ brains more than boys’, study finds. MRI scans found girls’ brains appeared 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years for boys.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/09/covid-lockdowns-prematurely-aged-girls-brains-more-than-boys-study-finds
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I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
COVID-19 lockdown effects on adolescent brain structure suggest accelerated maturation that is more pronounced in females than in males
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2403200121
From the linked article:
Covid lockdowns prematurely aged girls’ brains more than boys’, study finds
MRI scans found girls’ brains appeared 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years for boys
Adolescent girls who lived through Covid lockdowns experienced more rapid brain ageing than boys, according to data that suggests the social restrictions had a disproportionate impact on them.
MRI scans found evidence of premature brain ageing in both boys and girls, but girls’ brains appeared on average 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years older for boys.
“We were shocked by these data, that the difference is so dramatic,” said Prof Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, in Seattle.
The researchers gathered MRI scans from 160 nine- to 17-year-olds in 2018 and used them to build a model of how the brain’s cortex normally thins during school years. Some cortical thinning is natural and an important part of brain maturation and specialisation in adolescence.
The team revisited the same cohort in 2021 and 2022, after lockdowns, and collected further MRI scans from those aged 12 to 16. Compared with pre-pandemic brain development, these showed signs of accelerated cortical thinning in one area of the boys’ brains, and in 30 of the girls’ brains, across both hemispheres and all lobes.
Other researchers have linked premature brain ageing to the pandemic, but the latest study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to reveal stark differences between boys and girls.
It’s worth pointing out that nowhere in this study do they mention filtering out or adjusting for incidences of SARS-CoV-2 infection in their subjects, and that other studies have demonstrated that cortical density loss is observed (also via MRI) after SARS-CoV-2 infection:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-52005-7
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2403200121
Given this, it seems odd to me that the researchers would jump to the conclusion that lockdown lifestyle changes (which were not even observed by many Americans) were the cause of this cortical thinning, and not SARS-CoV-2 infection.