Study Finds COVID Pandemic Accelerated Brain Aging in Everyone
The pandemic has aged everyone’s brain – even in healthy people
A study of nearly 1,000 people showed that brain aging was not linked to infection status
The brain of healthy people aged faster during the Covid-19 pandemic than the brain of people analyzed before the start of the pandemic, suggests a study of almost 1,000 people. Accelerated aging has occurred even in people who are not infected.
Accelerated aging, recorded as structural changes observed in brain analyzes, was most visible in the elderly, male participants and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. But cognitive tests have revealed that mental agility decreased only in participants who picked up a case of COVID-19, which suggests that faster brain aging does not necessarily result in altered thought and memory.
The study “really underlines the importance of the pandemic environment for mental and neurological health”, explains Mahdi Moqri, a computer biologist who studies aging at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. It is not clear if the brain aging associated with the pandemic is reversible, because the study analyzed of the analyzes taken at two times, adds the MOQRI.
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The results were published today in Nature communications.
Pandemic effect
Previous research has offered indices that Sras-COV-2 infections can worsen neurodegeneration and cognitive decline in the elderly. But few studies have explored whether the pandemic period-a tumultuous period marked by social isolation, disturbances in lifestyle and stress for many-also affected brain aging, explains the co-author of the Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad-Nejad study, neuroimperie researcher at the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom.
To discover this, Mohammadi-Nejad and his colleagues analyzed the brain scanners collected from 15,334 healthy adults with an average age of 63 years in the British study Biobank (UKBB), a long-term biomedical surveillance scheme. They have formed automatic learning models on hundreds of structural characteristics of the participants’ brain, who taught the model what the brain looks at various ages. The team could then use these models to predict a person’s brain age. The difference between this value and the chronological age of a participant is “the age gap of the brain”.
The team then applied the brain age models to a separate group of 996 health participants from the UKBB who had all had two brain scans at least a few years apart. Some participants had undergone a scan before the pandemic and another after the start of the pandemic. Those who had had the two scans before the pandemic were appointed the control group. The models estimated the age of the brain of each participant at the time of the two scans.
Almost six more months
The models predicted that the brain of people who had experienced the pandemic were the age of 5.5 months faster than those of the witness group, regardless of the question of whether those who were digitized during the pandemic had already contracted COVVI-19. “Brain health is shaped not only by disease, but by our daily environment,” explains Mohammadi-Nejad.
The cerebral aging linked to the pandemic has been the most pronounced in the participants and older men, who are known to be more sensitive to neurological changes when they are stressed than women. The brain of those who experience difficulties, such as unemployment, low income and poor health, also aged faster than those of other participants, which suggests that these lifestyle stressors have a harmful impact on brain health.
Shape and function
Then, Mohammadi-Nejad and his colleagues evaluated the participants who had finished the cognitive tests twice, they were scanned. They found that only those who had a SARS-COV-2 infection in the interval between the analyzes showed signs of cognitive decline, such as mental flexibility and reduced treatment speed. This suggests that physical aging of the brain may not have been serious enough to affect mental acuity during the pandemic. “Some changes do not trigger symptoms, and others take many years for any symptoms to manifest,” said Mohammadi-Nejad.
Although the results are “convincing” evidence that brain aging has accelerated during the pandemic, more work must be done to study a causal link, explains Agustín Ibáñez, neuroscientist from Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago. He adds that future studies should include data on factors such as mental health, isolation and lifestyle to clarify the underlying mechanisms for the brain age effect and how they take place in people from different backgrounds.
The next steps of Mohammadi-Nejad and his colleagues consist in disentangling some of these mechanisms and exploring if the effects are long.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first publication July 22, 2025.
