‘What surprised me most was that even people who hadn’t had Covid showed significant increases in brain ageing rates,’ the study’s lead author said.
Brain aging appears to have accelerated by several months during the COVID-19 pandemic, even in people who did not get sick from the virus, according to a new study.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications on July 22, found that in 2021 and 2022, brain scans from a large UK database showed signs of aging, including brain shrinkage, even in individuals who were never infected.
Although people who had a COVID-19 infection showed some declines in overall cognitive performance, the authors said that structural brain changes were seen across a larger population.
They highlighted pandemic-related stressors, such as anxiety, social isolation, and economic and health insecurity, as possible reasons for the increase in brain aging.
The research suggested that the pandemic may have also prematurely aged some individuals’ brains by an average of 5.5 months, even among those who never contracted the virus. The impacts of the pandemic on the brain were most pronounced in men and people from “deprived socio-demographic backgrounds,” the study said.
The team analyzed brain scans collected from 15,334 healthy adults, with an average age of 63, in the UK Biobank—a long-term monitoring program—and then used machine-learning models to examine “hundreds of structural features of the participants’ brains, which taught the model how the brain looks at various ages,” the study’s lead author, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a researcher at the University of Nottingham, stated in a paper released alongside the study.
After that, they applied the model to a group of 996 healthy UK Biobank participants who had two brain scans at least “a couple of years apart,” he added. Some participants had one scan done before the pandemic and another following the onset of the pandemic, in early 2020, the study stated.
“What surprised me most was that even people who hadn’t had Covid showed significant increases in brain ageing rates,” Mohammadi-Nejad said in a statement. “It really shows how much the experience of the pandemic itself, everything from isolation to uncertainty, may have affected our brain health.”
