Brains aged faster during the pandemic, study says

The brains of healthy people aged more rapidly during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the aging occurred even in those who were not infected with the virus.

This is the conclusion of a study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, with almost a thousand participants.

According to him, accelerated aging was observed through structural changes visible through brain scans, which were more noticeable in older people, men and poorer people and those from more disadvantaged environments.

However, and the most surprising thing about the results, is that the cognitive tests revealed that mental agility only decreased in participants who were infected with the Covid-19 virus, which suggests that brain aging does not necessarily translate into difficulties with thinking or memory.

Mahdi Moqri, a biologist specializing in aging at Harvard Medical School in Boston, told Nature that the study “clearly highlights the importance of the pandemic environment for mental and neurological health,” but that it is not yet clear whether the brain aging associated with the pandemic is reversible, since the study analyzed scans performed only at two different time points.

The effect of the pandemic

Neurodegeneration caused by the Covid-19 virus is not new: previous studies have already pointed to it and to cognitive decline in older people.

However, few studies have explored whether the pandemic itself also impacted brain aging. This was one of the questions Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a neuroimaging researcher at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, set out to answer.

The study's co-author and colleagues analyzed brain scans of 15,334 healthy adults, with an average age of 63, as part of a long-term biomedical monitoring study and, using a machine learning model, were able to predict the "biological" age of the participants' brains.

Thus, through the estimated age and the person's real age, the “brain age difference” was removed.

Based on the results of a control group that underwent tests before the pandemic, it was possible to study the effect of Covid-19 on participants who underwent the test afterward.

Almost six months of extra aging

The models predicted that the brains of people who lived through the pandemic aged, on average, five and a half months more than the brains of the control group —regardless of whether they were infected with the Covid-19 virus or not.

According to Mohammadi-Nejad, brain health "is shaped not only by disease, but also by everyday life."

Pandemic-related brain aging was more pronounced in older participants and in men, who are known to be more susceptible to neurological changes when exposed to stress.

The brains of people in precarious situations—such as unemployment, low income, or health problems—also aged more quickly, suggesting that these stressors have a negative impact on brain health.

The team also concluded that those who were infected with the Covid-19 virus between the two exams showed signs of cognitive decline - reduced mental flexibility and processing speed - suggesting that physical brain aging may not have been severe enough to affect mental abilities during the pandemic.

Although the findings are "compelling," the researchers argue that further studies are needed to investigate whether there is indeed a causal relationship, and that future research should include data on the impact of the pandemic on mental health, isolation, and lifestyle on brain aging.