Decoding Teenagers' Stress Responses during the Pandemic through Brain Scans

The potential of brain scans for forecasting the mental health trajectory of teenagers during stress-ridden periods, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, has been highlighted in a recent analysis.

The research, revealed on November 13 at the Society for Neuroscience's annual gathering, could shed light on the differences in stress resilience among individuals.

According to Margot Wagner, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego who wasn't part of the study, most research involves executing a study, reporting results, and wrapping it up. However, this particular study involved long-term follow-up of a large group of teenagers which makes early intervention possible and more effective.

The pandemic imposed significant challenges on teenagers, with isolation, anxiety, and disruption of regular schedules causing impacts that are being steadily understood. An alarming increase in depression and anxiety among young people is now being referred to as the "second pandemic".

The researchers, led by Caterina Stamoulis, a computational neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, examined varying pandemic responses based on data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study that involved 21 research sites nationwide, and which seeks to explain brain development in adolescents.

Emphasising the uniqueness of the research, Wagner pointed out that this is the first instance of studying thousands of participants and collecting data over a long duration.

With the ABCD study underway prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the researchers had access to pre-pandemic brain scans. The long-drawn pandemic enabled them to understand the aftermath of a long-lasting, life-disrupting event, Stamoulis said.

At the onset of the ABCD study, 1,414 teenagers, subset of the 11,000 plus enrollees, underwent fMRI brain scans for measuring blood flow, an indicator of brain cell activity. The scans helped in understanding how different brain regions function collectively, what neuroscientists term as brain circuits.

Vince Calhoun, a neuroscientist and engineer from Georgia Tech, mentioned the usefulness of neuroimaging data in devising predictive models for outcomes related to mental resilience, depression, and more.

Researchers initiated regular surveys among study participants from May 2020 as the pandemic led to the world wide shut down. These surveys assessed the teenagers' mental health, stress levels, and mood, based on a set of parameters.

The team observed that teenagers with weaker neural connections, especially between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, were worse off during the pandemic in comparison to those with stronger connections. This underscores the relationship between the strength of brain connections and the degree of sadness and stress experienced by the children during the pandemic.

In Stamoulis's words, greater stress and sadness were linked to weaker network resilience, while stronger and more robust brain networks were predictive of better mental health and reduced stress and sadness.

The researchers now aim to further explore these brain circuits to understand how brains develop in response to experiences and environments. Stamoulis believes that positive experiences can act as protective factors for the brain.