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, a new study found.
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 COVID-19 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 COVID-19 pandemic may have also prematurely aged some individuals’ brains by an average of 5 1/2 months, even among those who never contracted the virus. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the brain were most pronounced in men and people from “deprived socio-demographic backgrounds,” study authors stated.
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, the researchers applied the model to a group of 996 healthy UK Biobank participants who had undergone two brain scans that were at least “a couple of years apart,” he stated. Some participants had one scan done before the COVID-19 pandemic and another following its onset, in early 2020, the study stated.
“What surprised me most was that even people who hadn’t had [COVID-19] 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.”
The long-term impacts of the brain changes aren’t clear, the researchers said, but they concluded that there is a need to “address health and socio-economic inequalities in addition to lifestyle factors to mitigate accelerated brain ageing.” More research is also crucial to “improve brain health outcomes in future public health crises,” they stated.
The study did not consider vaccination status.
A man rests on a bench during the COVID-19 pandemic, in Oldham, England, on July 29, 2020. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent update that COVID-19 cases are rising in some parts of the United States, although the levels for the virus remain low.
According to the CDC’s July 25 report, COVID-19 activity is now increasing in some Southeast, Southern, and West Coast states. Citing wastewater data, the agency said that positive tests for the virus are increasing nationally, while emergency department visits appear to be increasing among children up to age 4.
Wastewater detections of COVID-19 updated by the CDC suggest that higher levels of the virus are being reported in California, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, Kentucky, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas. Louisiana is experiencing very high levels, according to a map from the agency.
