COVID-19 Pandemic May Have Accelerated Brain Aging, New Study Finds

Did the COVID-19 pandemic cause your brain to age faster? A recent study is sounding the alarm that the impacts of the pandemic may have accelerated cognitive aging. What is most worrisome is that these impacts were observed regardless of whether you actually got COVID-19, meaning that it was the impact of the pandemic rather than the disease itself that was responsible for the changes in the brain. Read on for the details.

Accelerated Brain Aging Attributed to COVID-19 Pandemic, Rather Than the Virus

A study published in Nature Communications is once again pointing to the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the most significant health crisis to hit the world in this lifetime. The researchers found that the months surrounding the pandemic were connected to what was observed to be accelerated brain aging.

The scientists looked at the brains of nearly 1,000 people, dividing them into two groups. The control group had undergone two MRI scans that were conducted prior to the onset of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020. A second group, nicknamed the "pandemic group," underwent one MRI before the start of the pandemic and one after the onset of the global health crisis.

The results from both sets of MRIs were compared against an existing set of data that had documented the brain imaging of over 15,000 healthy people. The goal of the comparison was to demonstrate the gap between predicted brain age and chronological age. For context, the chronological age was the subject's real age, while the predicted brain age was defined by the actual physical state of the brain.

Researchers found that there was a significant gap between predicted and chronological brain age after the pandemic. The average gap increase came in at 5.5 months, enough of a difference to be deemed statistically relevant by the researchers. What was most surprising is that this gap was present regardless of whether the subject had been diagnosed with COVID-19.