Key Summary
- A University of Nottingham study found that weeks of isolation and the uncertainty surrounding the crisis affected everyone
- Researchers found that people had a “5.5-month higher deviation of brain age gap” after Covid
- Brain ageing was “more pronounced” among men, older people, and those from deprived backgrounds
A new study has suggested that the Covid-19 pandemic was “detrimental” to brain health, even for those who never contracted the virus.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham claim that the strain of the pandemic on people’s lives may have aged their brains prematurely.
They propose that the strain placed on people’s lives – from weeks of isolation to the pervasive uncertainty surrounding the crisis – may have aged the people's brains.
They found that brain ageing was “more pronounced” among men, older people, and those from deprived backgrounds.
The findings emerged from brain ageing models initially trained using data from over 15,000 healthy people.
These models were then applied to nearly 1,000 participants in the UK Biobank study, a project monitoring the health of middle-aged and older adults.
Researchers analysed brain scans, with half of them having undergone scans before the pandemic, and the remainder having scans both before and after the global health crisis.
After reviewing the imaging data, the academics concluded that the pandemic "significantly" accelerated brain ageing.
The researchers 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”.
This was regardless of whether they had the SARS-CoV-2 infection, the experts wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
They found that people who had the infection performed more poorly on cognitive tests.
Professor Dorothee Auer, professor of neuroimaging and senior author on the study, said, “Brain health is shaped not only by illness, but by our everyday environment."
