NBC News
A new study suggests that cerebral aging could have accelerated during the pandemic, even in people who did not contract COVID-19.
Using brain scanners from an extensive database, British researchers determined that, during the years of pandemic, from 2021 to 2022, people’s brains showed signs of aging, including shrinking, according to the report published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
People infected with the virus also show deficits in certain cognitive abilities, such as processing speed and mental flexibility.
The effect of aging “was more pronounced in men and in people with more disadvantaged socioeconomic environments,” said the first author of the study, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a neuroimaging researcher at the University of Nottingham.
“This highlights that brain health is not affected solely by the disease, but also by broader vital experiences,” he said.
In general, researchers detected an acceleration of 5.5 months in aging associated with pandemic. On average, the difference in cerebral aging between men and women was small, about 2.5 months.
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“We still do not know exactly why, but this agrees with other research that suggests that men could be more affected by certain types of stress or health problems,” said Mohammadi-Nejad.
The brain shrinks as people age. When gray matter shrinks prematurely, it can cause memory loss or problems of judgment, although the study on pandemic does not show if people with structural changes will eventually develop cognitive deficits.
The study was not designed to identify specific causes.
“But it is likely that the accumulated experience of pandemic-including psychological stress, social isolation, interruptions in daily life, reduction of activity and well-being-has contributed to the observed changes,” said Mohammadi-Nejad. “In this sense, the pandemic period itself seems to have left a mark on our brains, even in the absence of infection.”
An earlier study on how pandemic affected adolescents’ brain threw a similar result. The 2024 investigation of the University of Washington discovered that the brain of the boys had aged the equivalent of 1.4 more years during the pandemic, while that of the girls had aged 4.2 more years.
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In the new study, Mohammadi-Nejad and his team resorted to the Biobanco of the United Kingdom, a huge database created in 2006, to determine if the pandemic had an impact on people’s brain. The database has been registering anonymous health data of 500,000 volunteers recruited between 2006 and 2010, when participants were between 40 and 69 years. To date, Biobanco has compiled 100,000 complete body scanners.
To develop a normal reference model, to compare it with what could have happened during the pandemic years, the researchers used image data of 15,334 healthy people, collected before the pandemic.
“We use this wide set of data to teach our model how typical and healthy brain aging is seen throughout adult life,” said Mohammadi-Nejad.
Next, the researchers analyzed a group of 996 participants who underwent two explorations, the second of which was carried out on average 2.3 years after the first. Of these participants, 564 underwent both explorations before the pandemic, which helped artificial intelligence to understand how the brain changes when there is no pandemic.
The other 432 underwent a second exploration after the start of the pandemic, mainly between 2021 and 2022, which allowed researchers to investigate how pandemic could have affected brain aging.
Although these second explorations were made later in the pandemic, “they reflect brain changes that probably occurred during the peak of the pandemic, when people experienced the greatest disorders,” said Mohammadi-Nejad.
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Other investigations have suggested that environmental factors could cause the brain of a person to age prematurely. A study conducted in Antarctica related life in relative isolation with the reduction of brain size. “The most intriguing finding of this study is that only those who were infected with SARS-COV-2 showed cognitive deficits, despite structural aging,” said Jacqueline Becker, clinical neuropsychologist and attached teacher of medicine at the ICAHN School of Medicine of Mount Sinai. “This reflects in part the effects of the virus itself.”
And that could eventually help explain syndromes such as prolonged covid and chronic fatigue, he said.
What we do not know about this study is whether the structural changes in the brain observed in people who did not contract COVID will translate into observable changes in brain function, Becker said.
Adam Brickman, a professor of neuropsychology at the College of Physicians and Vaglos Surgeons at Columbia University, said the study offers a convincing narrative, but “it is still a hypothesis.”
It does not demonstrate whether the accelerated aging observed in people who did not contract COVID will persist in the long term, said Brickman, who did not participate in the study.
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If the pandemic really modified the brain significantly, people could counteract those changes by doing healthy activities for the brain, he said.
“We know that exercise is good for the brain and that, for example, maintaining blood pressure at a healthy level. We know that sleep and social interactions are important,” he added.
