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Los Angeles Times
20 hours ago
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Pandemic aged our brains faster, whether or not we got COVID, study says
By almost any measure, living through a once-in-a-century pandemic emergency that killed 7 million people — including 1.1 million in the U.S. alone — was a harrowing experience. Now, there's new evidence suggesting our brains bear the scars of that ordeal. Living through the pandemic aged our brains faster — even among people who never became sick with COVID-19, according to a recent study. 'Our study suggests that the experience of living through the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with slightly faster brain aging, even in people who were never infected with the virus,' the study's lead author, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad of the University of Nottingham in England, wrote in an email to The Times. 'This effect was subtle but measurable,' he added. The study, published this month in the journal Nature Communications, wasn't designed to pinpoint the exact cause of the accelerated brain aging. 'But we believe the cumulative stressors of the pandemic — such as prolonged isolation, disrupted routines, reduced physical and cognitive activity, and economic uncertainty — likely contributed to the observed brain changes,' Mohammadi-Nejad said. Those factors are all known to influence brain health over time. As the study notes, 'it remains unclear whether these brain aging effects may be at least partially reversible.' Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a UC San Francisco infectious-disease expert who wasn't affiliated with the study, said its findings demonstrate 'that even if you don't get infected, all the repercussions of the pandemic — like social isolation and stress — can have an impact on brain health.' 'We know that other things that we do have an impact on brain health, like exercise and diet and sleep,' Chin-Hong said. 'So it makes sense that something as global and as profound as a pandemic would have an impact on brain health.' Those effects don't necessarily include immediate decreased cognitive function, however. Although researchers documented accelerated aging in generally all the brain scans they studied, only those who contracted COVID-19 showed 'small but measurable declines in cognitive performance — mainly in processing speed and mental flexibility,' according to Mohammadi-Nejad. 'This suggests that infection may introduce additional biological effects, such as inflammation or vascular issues, that are more directly linked to cognitive symptoms,' he said. Past studies have noted cognitive effects after COVID-19 illness, especially in severe cases, he said. But what's new is that evidence of cognitive decline was found even in this study's population 'of generally healthy volunteers, most of whom had mild cases.' 'It shows that even mild infection can leave subtle traces in the brain, although the effect size is relatively small,' Mohammadi-Nejad said. The effect was especially pronounced among older people, the study found, 'suggesting a complex model of cognitive decline due to more pronounced accelerated brain aging from infection-related factors in older people.' The study was based on an analysis of brain scans from the UK Biobank, a large biomedical database in the United Kingdom that contains health information from volunteers taken both before and after the onset 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 comprised primarily middle-aged and older people, ranging in age from 47 to 79. Only those who were generally healthy were included in the study, meaning they didn't have chronic illness such as heart disease, diabetes, dementia, kidney disease or major depression. In this group, scientists found the accelerated brain aging was seen more strongly overall in older people and men. People who were socioeconomically disadvantaged — ranking lower on indicators such as income, education, employment and health access — also had more pronounced brain aging, Mohammadi-Nejad said, 'likely due to increased exposure to pandemic-related stress and fewer resources to buffer its effects.' This isn't the first study to suggest brain health was altered by the experience of living through the pandemic. A study published last year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by scientists at the University of Washington, suggested that COVID-19 lockdown measures 'resulted in unusually accelerated brain maturation in adolescents' and was greater in magnitude in females than males. The authors of that study noted that 'females are at a higher risk for developing anxiety and mood disorders than males during typical adolescent development.' But among adults, past research has suggested 'men may be more susceptible to certain forms of brain aging,' Mohammadi-Nejad said. Other research, the study noted, has found 'greater male susceptibility to cortical atrophy and neuroinflammation under stress, which aligns with our findings of heightened pandemic-related brain aging in males.' There are a number of limitations to the study. The people participating in the study who had COVID-19 had mostly mild cases — and they were generally healthier than the population overall, since those with chronic illnesses were excluded. Among study participants who contracted COVID-19, fewer than 4% required hospitalization. The vast majority had mild illness; and all participants tested negative for COVID-19 within two to three weeks. Other factors also could contribute to the documented brain aging, including 'reduced physical activity, poorer diets and increased alcohol consumption' during the pandemic, the study said. Many unanswered questions remain. If further studies do prove the pandemic-related factors caused accelerated brain aging, rather than simply being associated with it, how long will those effects last? And, 'once you have it, can you do anything to make it better?' Chin-Hong asked. The study doesn't answer the question of whether the accelerated brain aging is reversible. But it is well known that there are things that are good for general brain health, Mohammadi-Nejad said: physical activity, mental stimulation, social interaction, healthy sleep and good nutrition among them. 'Public policies that reduce social isolation and ensure continued access to physical, cognitive, and emotional well-being during major disruptions could help mitigate future effects on brain health,' he said. For some, the study may raise the question of whether the pandemic-era response measures employed in Britain were worth the cost. But answering that question today — years after COVID ceased to be a novel public health threat — is complicated. 'Our study wasn't designed to evaluate public health policies or determine what should or shouldn't have been done. What we show is that the pandemic experience, independent of infection, was associated with changes in brain health,' Mohammadi-Nejad said. COVID-19 today is very different than the dark early period of the pandemic, when the disease devastated many families, prematurely killing grandparents and leaving children to grow up without their dad or mom. The death rate was much higher in the initial phase of the emergency, with hospitals in some areas overwhelmed with staggering numbers of critically ill people. The risk of getting long COVID, and suffering debilitating symptoms such as brain fog or persistent fatigue, was also once much higher than it is today. Early in the pandemic, 'it was a more serious time for COVID,' Chin-Hong said. 'It was a time when you didn't want to get infected at all.... Like, who would want to get Alpha or Delta, you know?' he added, referring to the variants that preceded Omicron. Today's version of COVID is 'less invasive — even independent of the fact that we have more immunity,' Chin-Hong said. The latest subvariants of the coronavirus don't 'get inside the body as much as the earlier variants.' Chin-Hong said he's glad there was a time early in the pandemic where 'we tried to avoid COVID as much as possible,' noting that infection itself has a chance of affecting the brain. That said, it's also clear that health issues such loneliness have a clear effect on brain health. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. surgeon general, issued an advisory on what he called a national epidemic of loneliness and isolation in 2023, and warned that loneliness is associated with a greater risk of dementia, depression, anxiety and premature death. About half of U.S. adults experienced loneliness even before the pandemic, according to Murthy's report, which urged the public to fight loneliness and isolation by taking steps to strengthen their relationships. The British government in 2018 found loneliness to be such a public health concern that it created a new position: minister of loneliness. The latest study underscores the idea that things such as exercise, sleep, diet, social connection and stress reduction are important for our brain health, according to Chin-Hong. Resolving stress and a lack of social connection 'is probably as important as ... focusing on things like blood pressure and the things we traditionally think about,' he said.
Buzz Feed
2 days ago
- Health
- Buzz Feed
Apparently Covid Aged All Our Brains, Even If You Didn't Catch It
Those with long Covid, a condition which sees symptoms persist months or even years after catching the Covid-19 virus, have long reported 'brain fog'. Though scientists aren't sure why the link seems to exist, some suspect that Covid can persist in the gut long after the acute infection has gone – creating microbiome changes associated with brain issues. But new research published in Nature Communications last week (22 July) has suggested the pandemic may have aged all of our brains, whether we caught the virus or not. In fact, it appeared to have aged our brains by nearly six months. How much did the pandemic age our brains? The researchers looked at the brain scans of almost 1,000 healthy people from the UK Biobank study. They checked them before the pandemic, and some had scans after, too. Using data from over 15,000 brain scans, along with machine learning and imaging, the scientists predicted the brain age of the participants involved in the study. After comparing like-for-like scans (participants were matched for gender, age, and health status), the researchers found that, on average, our brains' ageing appeared to have been accelerated by 5.5 months after the pandemic. This was the case whether or not participants had actually caught Covid themselves. 'What surprised me most was that even people who hadn't had Covid showed significant increases in brain ageing rates,' the study's lead author Dr Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad said. 'It really shows how much the experience of the pandemic itself, everything from isolation to uncertainty, may have affected our brain health.' Why did the pandemic appear to make our brains age faster? This study didn't seek to find that out, but its results suggest that brain ageing may have hit men and socioeconomically-disadvantaged people harder. The researchers speculated that a lack of socialising and exercise for some in the pandemic may have led to the change, as could increased consumption of alcohol. 'This study reminds us that brain health is shaped not only by illness, but by our everyday environment,' Dr Dorothee Auer, Professor of Neuroimaging and senior author on the study, said. 'The pandemic put a strain on people's lives, especially those already facing disadvantage. We can't yet test whether the changes we saw will reverse, but it's certainly possible, and that's an encouraging thought.'
WIRED
2 days ago
- Health
- WIRED
The Pandemic Appears to Have Accelerated Brain Aging, Even in People Who Never Got Covid
Jul 29, 2025 12:52 PM Stress, isolation, and uncertainty appear to have caused the brain to age quicker for those who lived through the crisis. Photographer: LisaMore than five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are still discovering the after-effects of not only the virus but also the prolonged period of stress, isolation, loss, and uncertainty that the pandemic caused. A new scientific study, published this month in Nature Communications, has revealed that the pandemic may have accelerated brain aging in people even if they were never infected with the coronavirus. Researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK analyzed brain images captured before and after the onset of the health crisis. The scientists found that the brains of those who lived through the pandemic appeared to age faster over its duration compared to those whose brains were only scanned prior to March 2020. 'What surprised me most was that even people who hadn't had Covid showed significant increases in brain aging rates,' said Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a coauthor of the study, in a statement on the university's website. 'It really shows how much the experience of the pandemic itself, everything from isolation to uncertainty, may have affected our brain health.' The team used longitudinal data from the UK Biobank, a huge dataset that is periodically collecting biological information from roughly half a million people over a long period of time and which includes MRI scans of nearly 1,000 adults. Of these people, some had received two scans before the pandemic (the control group), while others had one before and one after confinement and health restrictions had been implemented in response to the viral outbreak (the 'pandemic' group). 'The longitudinal MRI data acquired before and after the pandemic from the UK Biobank gave us a rare window to observe how such a major life event can affect the brain,' said Stamatios Sotiropoulos, professor of computational neuroimaging at the University of Nottingham and a coauthor of the study, in a statement. To estimate each person's 'brain age,' the researchers trained a machine-learning model on more than 15,000 healthy volunteers without chronic diseases to allow them to determine how much older or younger a brain looked relative to its chronological age. They then used this tool to assess the ages of the MRI brain scans in the two Biobank groups. When looking at the second scans in each group, the mean difference between chronological and measured age was 5.5 months higher in the pandemic group compared to the control group. The researchers also found that this acceleration of brain aging was more marked in older people, men, and those from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, such as those with low educational levels, precarious jobs, or housing and health difficulties. 'This study reminds us that brain health is shaped not only by illness but by our everyday environment,' said Dorothee Auer, lead author of the study, in in a statement released by the University of Nottingham. 'The pandemic put a strain on people's lives, especially those already facing disadvantage.' Although brain aging was seen universally among those living through the pandemic, only those infected went on to show measurable cognitive impairment, a symptom of Covid that has been documented in the past. The study found that those in the pandemic group who had Covid between the two scans experienced a drop in performance in mental flexibility and processing speed tests. In contrast, those who were not infected showed no significant cognitive changes, suggesting that structural aging does not always translate into visible functional symptoms. However, the authors acknowledge that there are some important limitations to this observational study, which could bias the results. These include the interval of time between people's scans differing between the two groups, as well as the UK Biobank lacking representation from the most marginalized sectors of the British population. The researchers also highlighted the possibility of reversibility, as only brain scans from two time points were analyzed, meaning that there may be neurological recovery in these people in subsequent years. 'We don't yet know if the observed changes can be reversed, but it is an encouraging idea,' Auer said. This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.
The Star
2 days ago
- Health
- The Star
Study: Covid-19 has affected our brains
The strain on people's lives during the pandemic such as weeks of isolation and uncertainty surrounding the crisis may have aged people's brains, researchers believe. — dpa The Covid-19 pandemic was 'detrimental' to brain health, even among people who never caught the infection, a new study reveals. Academics suggest the strain on people's lives – from isolation for weeks on end to the uncertainty surrounding the crisis – may have aged the brains of society. They found that brain ageing during the pandemic was 'more pronounced' among men, older people and people from deprived backgrounds. Brain ageing models were trained on more than 15,000 healthy people. These were then applied to almost 1,000 people taking part in the UK Biobank study – a long-term study tracking the health of middle and older aged adults. Half of the group had brain scans before the pandemic while the others had brain scans before and after the global crisis. After looking at the scans, academics said that the pandemic 'significantly' accelerated brain ageing. This was assessed by their brain age, as determined by the scans, compared with their actual age. The research team found that, on average, the scans taken after people had lived through the crisis had a '5.5-month higher deviation of brain age gap'. 'We found that the Covid-19 pandemic was detrimental to brain health and induced accelerated brain ageing. regardless of SARS-CoV-2 infection,' the experts from the University of Nottingham wrote in the journal Nature Communications . Dr Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, who led the study, said: 'What surprised me most was that even people who hadn't had Covid showed significant increases in brain ageing rates. 'It really shows how much the experience of the pandemic itself, everything from isolation to uncertainty, may have affected our brain health.' The research team also examined whether having Covid-19 affected someone's cognitive performance by examining the results of tests taken at the time of the scans. They found that people who were infected with the virus appeared to perform more poorly on cognitive tests when they were assessed again after the pandemic. Dr Dorothee Auer, professor of neuroimaging and senior author on the study, added: 'This study reminds us that brain health is shaped not only by illness, but by our everyday environment. 'The pandemic put a strain on people's lives, especially those already facing disadvantage. 'We can't yet test whether the changes we saw will reverse, but it's certainly possible, and that's an encouraging thought.' – PA Media/dpa
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists achieve astonishing breakthrough that could unlock next-gen energy source: 'Approaching the theoretical limit'
Scientists achieve astonishing breakthrough that could unlock next-gen energy source: 'Approaching the theoretical limit' Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have discovered a way to enhance the light-absorption and light-emission qualities of quantum dots: a kind of semiconductor crystal developed to convert photons, or light particles, into energy. Their research, published in the Nature Communications journal after years of study, focused on optimizing the carrier multiplication process — that is, the process by which a single photon entering a semiconductor material can excite multiple electrons — in order to enhance the efficiency of the energy conversion. Through the introduction of magnetic manganese impurities that modify the properties of the quantum dots, the team designed a system that operated on spin exchange carrier multiplication, a step up from conventional carrier multiplication in terms of efficiency. "Power conversion efficiency simulations from the study predict that this method could achieve an efficiency increase of up to 41%, which is approaching the theoretical limit for fully optimized devices utilizing conventional carrier multiplication," the researchers noted. While the study speaks relatively in the abstract regarding the potential applications of the team's discovery in photochemistry, the improvement of conventional carrier multiplication methods has even more pressing relevance in the realm of solar cell research. As it stands, solar panels aren't capable of converting even half their absorbed sunlight into usable electricity, but as they become more and more mainstream on rooftops and solar farms alike, researchers across disciplines are finding ways to boost their photoconversion capacity. In particular, as the changing climate continues to manifest in the form of rising temperatures, volatile weather patterns, and resource scarcity, diversifying our clean energy sources becomes all the more essential. Carbon pollution is the leading cause of our planet's overheating crisis, and the power sector alone contributes over 44 billion tons of it each year, according to the International Energy Agency. There are a variety of alternatives to dirty fuels out there, ranging from wind power to nuclear energy, but solar panels are by far the most accessible for the average consumer. As a matter of fact, by going solar, you can take advantage of cutting-edge clean energy innovations from the comfort of your home, setting yourself up for a financially as well as environmentally conscious choice. If you're struggling to get started, tools like EnergySage can connect you with the best local installation services suited to your needs while saving you up to $10,000 on the process. What would it take for you to get rid of your gas stove? I'd pay for it myself Give me the new stove for free I'd need at least $2K I already have an electric stove Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for weekly updates on the latest innovations improving our lives and shaping our future, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet. Solve the daily Crossword
