Social isolation makes teenage girls' brains age faster
If your teenage daughter insists on hanging out with her friends, it might be beneficial to let her go.
In a study published on Sept 9 by the University of Washington, the brains of adolescents showed accelerated ageing – 1.4 years ahead of what was expected in boys and 4.2 years in girls.
Researchers attributed the rapid ageing of the adolescent brains to social isolation as the study was done in 2021, after restricted movements due to the Covid-19 pandemic were lifted.
“That is a stunning difference,” NYTimes quoted the university's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences director Patricia K. Kuhl as saying.
She cited the example of “a girl who came in at 11 and returned to the lab at age 14, with a brain like an 18-year-old’s”.
The change was triggered by “social deprivation caused by the pandemic”, according to Dr Kuhl, who pointed out that adolescent girls are more dependent on social interaction to relieve stress.
“In the girls, the effects were all over the brain – all the lobes, both hemispheres.”
The research team compared the post-pandemic test results taken from a sample size of 160 subjects with a model that predicted typical brain development in adolescence.
It is unknown if the changes were permanent or if the teens' brain development bounced back to a typical rate with the restoration of normal social interactions.
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