Research: The pandemic makes our brains faster, whether we gain interest or not

Almost any measure, living through a century of pandemic emergency, killing 7 million people (only 1.1 million in the United States) is a painful experience.

Now, there is new evidence that our brains are bringing scars of this ordeal.

According to a recent study, through pandemic age, our brains live faster in our brains, even those who have never been sick with Covid-19.”

“Our study shows that even people who have never been infected with the virus live a slightly faster life through the Covid-19 pandemic is associated with a slightly faster brain aging,” Ali-Reza Mohammadi-nejad of England, the University of Nottingham, England, wrote in an email in England.

“The effect is subtle, but measurable,” he added.

The study, published this month in the journal Nature Communications, is not intended to find out the exact cause of aging in the brain.

“But we believe that cumulative stressors of the pandemic, such as prolonged isolation, disruption of routines, reduced physical and cognitive activity, and economic uncertainty – may have led to observed brain changes,” Mohammadi-Nejad said.

These factors are known to affect brain health over time. As the study notes: “It is not clear whether the effects of these brain aging may be at least partially reversible.”

“Even if you are not infected, all the effects of the pandemic, such as social isolation and stress, such as social isolation and stress, can have an impact on brain health,” said Dr. UC Chin-hong, Ph.D., who is not affiliated with the study.

“We know we do affect brain health, such as exercise, diet and sleep,” Chin-hong said. “So it makes sense that something as profound as global and pandemics can have an impact on brain health.”

However, these effects do not necessarily include immediate reduction of cognitive function. Although the researchers recorded accelerated aging in all brain scans normally studied, only 19-year-old Covid-19 showed “a small but measurable decrease in cognitive performance, mainly in the decrease in processing speed and psychological flexibility.”

“This suggests that infection may introduce other biological effects, such as inflammation or vascular problems, which are more directly related to cognitive symptoms,” he said.

He said past studies have pointed to the cognitive effects after Covid-19 disease, especially in severe cases. But even in the population of this study, the “usually healthy volunteers, most with mild cases” found evidence of cognitive decline.

“This suggests that even mild infections can leave subtle traces in the brain, although the effect is relatively small,” Mohammadi-Nejad said.

The study found that this effect was particularly evident in older adults, “hinting on a complex model of cognitive decline due to the more obvious acceleration of brain aging by infection-related factors in older adults.”

The study is based on an analysis of brain scans from Biobank, a large biomedical database in the UK that contains health information from volunteers before and after the pandemic began.

The study focused on a group of 996 participants and compared brain scans performed before and after the pandemic. The group consists mainly of middle-aged and elderly people, ranging in age from 47 to 79 years old. There are only people who are usually healthy in the study, which means they do not have chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, dementia, kidney disease, or severe depression.

In this group, scientists found accelerated brain aging in the elderly and men in general. Mohammadi-Nejad said that socioeconomic disadvantage (such as indicators of income, education, employment and health access) are also more visible, Mohammadi-Nejad said: “It may be due to the increase in the pressure related to the pandemic, and fewer resources are reduced to mitigate its impact.”

This is not the first time that brain health has been changed through the pandemic experience.

Last year, a study published by University of Washington scientists in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences showed that Covid-19 lockdown measures “cause abnormal brain maturity in adolescents, while women are larger than men.

The authors of the study noted that “Women are at higher risk for anxiety and emotional disorders than men during typical adolescent development.”

But in adults, past studies have shown that “men may be more susceptible to certain forms of brain aging.” The study notes that other studies find that “men are more sensitive to cortical atrophy and neuroinflammation under stress, consistent with our findings about brain aging associated with the male pandemic.”

This study has many limitations. The number of people who participated in the study with COVID-19 was mostly mild cases – and generally healthier than the population, as people with chronic diseases were excluded.

Among the study participants who signed up for Covid-19, less than 4% of them required hospitalization. The vast majority of people suffer from mild illness; all participants tested negative for COVID-19 within two to three weeks.

Other factors may also lead to brain aging, including “reduced physical exercise, poor diet and increased alcohol consumption,” the study said.

There are still many unresolved issues. If further research does demonstrate that factors related to the pandemic can accelerate brain aging rather than just related, how long will these effects last? And, “Once there is, can you do something to make it better?” asked down the mountain.

The study did not answer the question of whether accelerating brain aging is reversible.

But Mohammadi-Nejad is known to say that there are things that are good for brain health in general: physical exercise, mental stimulation, social interaction, healthy sleep and good nutrition.

“Public policies that reduce social distancing and ensure continued access to physical, cognitive and emotional health during major disruptions can help mitigate the future impact on brain health,” he said.

For some, the study may raise the question of whether the response measures taken in the pandemic era in the UK are worth it.

But answering this question today (years after Covid is no longer a new public health threat) is complicated.

“Our research is not intended to evaluate public health policies or determine what should or should not be done. What we show is that pandemic experiences that are not related to infection are related to changes in brain health,” Mohammadi-Nejad said.

Today’s Covid-19 is very different from the dark early days of the pandemic, when the disease destroyed many families, killed grandparents too early, allowed children to grow up without a father or mom. In the early stages of an emergency, the mortality rate is much higher, with hospitals in some areas being overwhelmed by a large number of seriously ill people.

The risk of long-term mutual interest, symptoms such as brain fog or continuous fatigue, were once much higher than today.

In the early days of the pandemic, Chin-hong said, “it was a more serious time for Covid.” “That was a time when you didn’t want to get infected at all. … like, who wants to get alpha or delta, you know?” he added, referring to the variant before Omicron.

Chin-hong said today’s version of Covid is “less invasive and even independent of the fact that we have more immunity.” The latest subvariables of coronavirus are not “as much as they go into the body”.

Chin-hong said he was pleased that there was a time in the pandemic that “we tried to avoid creating the internet as much as possible” and pointed out that the infection itself has a chance to affect the brain.

That is to say, it is also obvious that this feeling of loneliness will have a significant impact on brain health. Former American surgeon Dr. Vivek Murthy published a consultation on his so-called loneliness and isolation epidemic in 2023 and warned that loneliness is associated with greater risks of dementia, depression, anxiety and premature death.

According to Musi’s report, even before the pandemic, about half of our adults experienced loneliness, which urged the public to fight loneliness and isolation by taking measures to strengthen their relationships. In 2018, the UK government found loneliness to be a public health concern that it created a new position: Minister of Loneliness.

The latest research highlights the importance of things like exercise, sleep, diet, social connection and stress relief to our brain health.

He said addressing stress and lack of social connections “maybe as important as … focusing on blood pressure is what we traditionally consider.”