The pandemic seems to have accelerated the aging of the brain, even in people who have never been in common
More than five A few years after the pandemic began on the 19th, we still found not only the virus, but also the extended periods of stress, isolation, loss and uncertainty caused by the pandemic. A new scientific study published this month in Natural Transmission shows that even if you have never contracted the coronavirus, the pandemic could cause people’s brain aging to accelerate.
Researchers at the University of Nottingham, UK, analyzed brain images captured before and after the health crisis began. Scientists have found that people who experience the pandemic have a faster brain age for their duration than brains that were scanned before March 2020.
“What surprised me the most was that even without a common person showed a significant increase in the rate of brain aging,” Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, co-author of the study, said in a statement on the university’s website. “It does show that the experience of the pandemic itself, from isolation to uncertainty, may have affected our brain health.”
The team used longitudinal data from the UK Biobank, a massive dataset that regularly collects biological information from around 500,000 people over the long term, including MRI scans of nearly 1,000 adults. Among these people, some had two scans before the pandemic (the control group), while others had one scan and one restriction and health restrictions in response to the virus outbreak (the “pandemic” organization).
“Longaromatic MRI data obtained before and after the UK biobank pandemic provides us with a rare window into how such major life events affect the brain,” Stamatios Sotiropoulos, professor of computing neuroimaging at the University of Nottingham, said in a statement.
To estimate the “brain age” of each person, the researchers trained machine learning models of more than 15,000 healthy volunteers without chronic diseases to enable them to determine if the brain is younger relative to its age. They then used this tool to evaluate the age of MRI brain scans in both biobank groups. When the second scan of each group was observed, the mean difference between age and measured age in the pandemic group was 5.5 months higher than that in the control group.
The researchers also found that this acceleration of brain aging is among older people, men, and people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, such as those with low education levels, unstable jobs or housing and health difficulties.
“This study reminds us that brain health is shaped not only by disease, but by our daily environment,” Dorothee Auer, the lead author of the study, said in a statement released by the University of Nottingham. “The pandemic has put stress on people’s lives, especially those who are already facing disadvantage.”
Although brain aging is widely believed by people through the pandemic, only those infected can show measurable cognitive impairment, which are symptoms of covid recorded in the past. The study found that people with a pandemic population connected between the two scans had a decline in psychological flexibility and processing speed tests. In contrast, there are no obvious cognitive changes in uninfected individuals, suggesting that structural aging does not always translate into visible functional symptoms.
However, the authors acknowledge that there are some important limitations in this observational study, which may be biased towards outcomes. These include the time interval between scans between the two groups, and the representative British biobank of the most marginalized sector of the UK population.
The researchers also highlighted the possibility of reversibility, as brain scans at only two time points were analyzed, meaning these people may have neurological recovery in the following years. “We don’t know yet whether the observed changes can be reversed, but it’s an encouraging idea,” Al said.
This story originally appeared in wired español and has been translated into Spanish.
