Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Mental Health and Brain Maturation in Adolescents: Implications for Analyzing Longitudinal Data

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant stress and disruption for young people, likely leading to alterations in their mental health and neurodevelopment. In this context, it is not clear whether youth who lived through the pandemic and its shutdowns are comparable psychobiologically to their age- and sex-matched peers assessed before the pandemic. This question is particularly important for researchers who are analyzing longitudinal data that span the pandemic.

Methods: In this study we compared carefully matched youth assessed before the pandemic (n=81) and after the pandemic-related shutdowns ended (n=82).

Results: We found that youth assessed after the pandemic shutdowns had more severe internalizing mental health problems, reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampal and amygdala volume, and more advanced brain age.

Conclusions: Thus, not only does the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have led to poorer mental health and accelerated brain aging in adolescents, but it also poses significant challenges to researchers analyzing data from longitudinal studies of normative development that were interrupted by the pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; adolescent neurodevelopment; analyzing longitudinal data; brain age; youth mental health.

Figure 1

Group differences on the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI), Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC) (sum of the Social Anxiety and Physical Symptom subscales), and Youth Self-Report (YSR) internalizing and externalizing. ∗p < .05, ∗∗∗p < .001. n.s., not significant.

Figure 2

Raw data are plotted for visualization. Significance levels are based on group differences in subcortical volumes (in mm) adjusted for intracranial volume, cortical thickness, and brain age gap estimation (BrainAGE) adjusted for chronological age. ∗p < .05, ∗∗∗p < .001. n.s., not significant.