By almost every measure, it was a disastrous experience, overcoming a once-in-a-century pandemic emergency that killed 7 million people, including 1.1 million in the United States alone.
Now there is new evidence suggesting that our brains are suffering from the ordeal.
Recent research has shown that living through the pandemic has aged our brains faster.
“Our research suggests that the experience of living through the Covid-19 pandemic was associated with slightly faster brain aging, even in people who have never been infected with the virus,” wrote Ali Reza Mohammadi Nejad of the University of Nottingham in England in emails during the era.
“The effect was subtle, but measurable,” he added.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications this month, was not designed to identify the exact cause of accelerated cerebral aging.
“However, we believe that cumulative stressors of the pandemic, including long-term isolation, routine disruption, decline in physical and cognitive activity, and economic uncertainty, are likely to have contributed to observed brain changes,” Mohammadi Nejad said.
All of these factors are known to affect brain health over time. As research notes, “It remains unclear whether these brain aging effects are at least partially reversible.”
Dr. Peter Chin Hong, an infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco, said the findings show that “even if you don’t get infected, all the effects of a pandemic, such as social isolation and stress, can affect brain health.”
“We know that exercise, diet and sleep can affect brain health,” Chinghong said. “So it makes sense that globally, something as profound as a pandemic will affect brain health.”
However, these effects do not necessarily include immediate cognitive decline. According to Mohammadi-Nejad, researchers recorded accelerated aging on all brain scans they commonly studied, but only those infected with Covid-19 showed “mainly small but measurable reductions in speed and mental flexibility.”
“This suggests that infection can have additional biological effects, such as inflammation and vascular problems, which is more directly related to cognitive symptoms,” he said.
Previous research has pointed out that it has cognitive effects in Covid-19 diseases, particularly in severe cases, he said. But what’s new is that the study’s “general healthy volunteer populations have found evidence of cognitive decline.”
“Although the size of the effect is relatively small, it shows that even mild infections can leave subtle traces in the brain,” Mohammadi Nejad said.
This effect was particularly pronounced among older adults, the study found that “suggesting a complex model of cognitive decline due to significant accelerated brain aging from infection-related factors in older adults.”
This study was based on analysis of brain scans from the UK Biobank, a large UK biomedical database. This includes health information from volunteers collected before and after the start of the pandemic.
The study focused on a group of 996 participants and compared brain scans taken before and after the pandemic began. The group consisted mainly of middle-aged and elderly people, between the ages of 47 and 79. Generally, only healthy individuals were included in the study. That is, there were no chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, dementia, kidney disease, or major depression.
In this group, scientists found that accelerated brain aging was generally more intense in older adults and in men. Socioeconomically disadvantaged people (lower indicators such as income, education, employment and access to health) also had more prominent brain aging, Mohammadi Nejad said, “because increased exposure to pandemic-related stress and fewer resources to mitigate its effects.”
This is not the first study to suggest that brain health has been altered by the experiences of living through the pandemic.
A study published last year in the National Academy of Sciences journal Proceedings, a scientist at the University of Washington, suggesting that measures of Covid-19 blockade “resulted in abnormally accelerated brain maturation in adolescents,” with women being larger in size than men.
The study authors stated that “women are at a higher risk of developing anxiety and mood disorders than men during typical adolescent development.”
However, among adults, previous studies suggest that “men may be susceptible to certain forms of brain aging,” Mohammadi Nejad said. Other studies state that “men are more susceptible to cortical atrophy and neuroinflammation under stress, consistent with the findings of increased pandemic-related brain aging in men.”
This study has many limitations. People involved in the study who had Covid-19 had mostly mild cases. And people with chronic illnesses were generally healthier than the entire population, as they were excluded.
Of the study participants signed up for Covid-19, fewer than 4% required hospitalization. The majority were mildly ill. And all participants tested negative for Covid-19 within 2-3 weeks.
Other factors could also contribute to documented brain aging, including “lower physical activity, lower diet and increased alcohol consumption” during the pandemic, studies say.
Many unanswered questions remain. If further research proved that pandemic-related factors were not merely related to it, but accelerated brain aging, how long will their effects last? And then asked Jinhong, “Once you get it, can you do something to improve it?”
This study does not answer the question of whether accelerated brain aging is reversible.
However, it is well known that there are good things for general brain health, Mohammadi Nejad said: physical activity, mental stimulation, social interactions, healthy sleep, and good nutrition among them.
“Public policies that reduce social isolation and ensure continued access to physical, cognitive and emotional well-being in times of major disruptions can help reduce future impacts on brain health,” he said.
For some, this study may raise the question of whether pandemic-era response measures adopted in the UK are worth the cost.
But today it’s complicated to answer that question a few years after Covid became a novel public health threat.
“Our research is not designed to evaluate public health policies or determine what to do or not. Regardless of infection, the experience of the pandemic is related to changes in brain health,” Mohammadi Nejad said.
Today’s Covid-19 is very different from the dark early period of the pandemic when the illness destroyed many families, killed grandparents early and allowed children to be raised without fathers or mothers. Mortality rates were much higher in the early stages of the emergency, with hospitals in some areas being overwhelmed by a significant number of critical people.
The risk of getting long covid, as well as debilitating symptoms such as brain fog and persistent fatigue, are also much higher than today.
Early in the pandemic, “it was a more serious time for Covid,” Chinghong said. “That was when you didn’t want to get infected at all… Do you know who wants to get an alpha or a delta?” he added, referring to the variant that precedes Omicron.
Today’s version of Covid is “less invasive – even irrelevant to the fact that we are more immune,” Chin-Hong said. The latest sub-variants of the coronavirus will not “get in your body as much as the previous variant.”
Qinghong said he “trying to avoid COVID whenever possible” early in the pandemic, saying the infection itself could have an impact on the brain.
However, it is clear that such loneliness issues have a clear effect on brain health. Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former US surgeon general, issued an advisory about what is known as the national epidemic of loneliness and isolation in 2023, warning that loneliness is associated with a higher risk of dementia, depression, anxiety and early death.
According to Mercy’s report, about half of our adults experienced loneliness even before the pandemic. In 2018, the British government discovered that loneliness was a very public health concern, and that it created a new position: the Minister of Loneliness.
According to Chin-Hong, the latest research highlights the idea that exercise, sleep, diet, social connection and stress reduction are important for brain health.
Resolving stress and lack of social connection is “probably just as important as focusing on blood pressure and what we traditionally think,” he said.
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