Although the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic are long gone, the times of fear, scientific debates, and restricted movement remain a painful memory, one that seems to have caused widespread brain aging, even in people who didn’t have the disease.

Specifically, a study of close to 1,000 people has revealed that the brains of healthy people, even those who circumvented the infection, aged faster during the COVID-19 pandemic than did the brains of people analyzed before the pandemic began, according to a Scientific American report from July 23.

Indeed, the structural changes evident in brain scans that indicated accelerated aging mostly occurred in older people, men, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds, although cognitive tests suggested declining mental agility only in those who had COVID-19, which means that faster brain aging doesn’t necessarily translate into impaired thinking and memory.

Studying the effect of COVID-19 on healthy people

As Mahdi Moqri, a computational biologist who studies aging at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, explains it, the study “really underlines how significant the pandemic environment was for mental and neurological health,” although it’s uncertain whether the pandemic-associated brain aging is reversible.

Previously, many studies have indicated that SARS-CoV-2 infections can worsen neurodegeneration and cognitive decline in older individuals, but there were only a few that explored whether the pandemic period itself had similar effects, according to Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a neuroimaging researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK.

According to the tested models in the newest analysis, the brains of people who had lived through the pandemic had aged by an average of 5.5 months faster than those in the control group, regardless of whether those scanned during the pandemic had ever contracted COVID-19.

In the words of Mohammadi-Nejad:

“Brain health is shaped not only by illness, but by our everyday environment.”

Furthermore, those most affected by pandemic-related brain aging were older people and men, particularly those experiencing hardship, such as unemployment, low income, and poor health. This suggests that these lifestyle stressors have a detrimental impact on brain health.

Meanwhile, the world isn’t out of danger yet when it comes to this traumatic pandemic, and the European Commission has granted approval for the first ‘self-amplifying’ mRNA COVID-19 vaccine called KOSTAIVE, which is already in Japan.