The pandemic may have aged our brains even before we caught covid-19

The COVVI-19 pandemic can have accelerated the aging of our brain before even caught the infection. Research suggests that even relatively early in the epidemic, the 5.5 month old brain, perhaps due to stress or lifestyle changes.

We know that many people with very long breathtaking experience cerebral fog, but years after the arrival of Covid-19, the broader neurological impact of the pandemic is far from being fully understood.

To understand this, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad at the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom, and his colleagues have formed an automatic learning model on 15,000 brain scans to identify how its structure changes with age.

They then fed the pairs of brain scanners of 996 volunteers from the UK Biobank study. Among these, 564 made two scans before March 2020, when Lockdown was introduced to the United Kingdom and acted as a control group. The remaining 432 volunteers had a scan before March 2020 and a later. Each scan was separated by three years, on average, with a minimum difference of two years.

When the researchers compared individuals from the two groups – who have been paved with age, sex and overall health – they found that the pandemic can have accelerated the aging of our 5.5 -month brain, based on structural changes in white and gray matters. This was even among those without known infection of COVID-19, which was recorded as part of the Biobank project.

This accelerated aging was particularly pronounced in men and those who were more private socio-economically. But participants in the biobank are generally healthier, richer and less diverse than the rest of the United Kingdom, so that the results may not apply more widely.

Researchers speculate that these changes may have occurred due to loneliness or stress of locking, or lifestyle changes that may have taken place at that time, as with exercise or alcohol consumption.

They write in their article that structural brain changes could be “at least partially reversible” and emphasize that the results are limited by the fact that the participants were all of the United Kingdom, so that the results may not reflect the potential effects of locking elsewhere. “Our results can in fact underestimate the impact of the pandemic on more vulnerable populations,” explains Mohammadi-Nejad.