“The findings are an important wake-up call about the fragility of the teenage brain,” said senior study author Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl, the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning and codirector of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, via email. “Teens need our support now more than ever.”
Significant socioemotional development occurs during adolescence, along with substantial changes to brain structure and function. The thickness of the cerebral cortex naturally peaks during childhood, steadily decreases throughout adolescence and continues to decrease through one’s lifespan, the authors wrote.
The researchers originally intended to track ordinary adolescent brain development over time, starting with MRIs the authors conducted on participants’ brains in 2018. They planned to follow up with them for another scan in 2020.
The pandemic delayed the second MRI by three to four years — when the 130 participants based in Washington state were between ages 12 and 20. The authors excluded adolescents who had been diagnosed with a developmental or psychiatric disorder or who were taking psychotropic medications.
The team used the pre-pandemic MRI data to create a “normative model” of how 68 regions of the brain would likely develop over typical adolescence, to which they could compare the post-pandemic MRI data and see if it deviated from expectations. This normative model is analogous to the normative growth charts used in pediatric offices to track height and weight in young children, the authors said. It has also been used by other researchers to study the effects of circumstances or conditions such as socioeconomic disadvantage, autism, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or traumatic stress.
The study revealed accelerated cortical thinning in the post-pandemic brains of teens — occurring in 30 brain regions across both hemispheres and all lobes for girls, and in only two regions for boys. The prevalence of the thinning amounted to 43% and 6% of the studied brain regions for girls and boys, respectively.
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