7 August 2025,
Thursday
7 August 2025,
Thursday
COVID Brain Aging Study: A new study has found that the rate of brain ageing may have accelerated even in individuals who were not infected during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also found that men were disproportionately affected. Published in Nature Communications, the study analysed the period of the pandemic when people were grappling with social isolation, lifestyle disruptions, and stress.
Several studies have found that SARS-CoV-2 infection worsened neurodegeneration and cognitive decline in older people. But this new research investigates how people were still affected by the pandemic irrespective of infection.
Researchers stated that the brains of older adults, men, and those from poorer families aged the fastest during the pandemic.
However, according to tests of cognitive ability, mental agility only declined in participants who had contracted COVID-19. The findings also suggest that accelerated brain ageing doesn't necessarily translate to declines in thinking and memory.
According to Nature magazine, Mahdi Mohamedi-Nejad, a computational biologist studying ageing at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, said the study really highlights how significant the pandemic environment was for mental and neurological health.
According to Mohamedi-Nejad, the study analysed scans taken at only two time points, and researchers are unsure whether the pandemic-related brain ageing is reversible.
The study found that the impact of accelerated brain ageing during the pandemic was most pronounced in men and those from poorer families.
This highlights that brain health is influenced not only by disease but also by broader life experiences.
The team of researchers studied the UK Biobank, using its dataset to train their model. This bank is a massive database of anonymised health data from 500,000 volunteers aged 40 to 69. They were recruited between 2006 and 2010.
The Biobank has collected 100,000 whole-body scans, and the researchers used imaging data from 15,334 healthy individuals collected before the pandemic.
Researchers also analysed data from 996 participants who had two scans, the second taken an average of 2.3 years after the first. Some participants had both scans before the pandemic, and some had their second scan after the pandemic began. All this data helped the AI model study the changes occurring in the brain.
Researchers found that the pandemic accelerated ageing by 5.5 months. Mohamedi-Nejad said, "We don't yet know exactly why this happens, but it aligns with other research suggesting that men may be more susceptible to certain types of stress or health challenges."
