r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Sep 09 '24

Neuroscience Covid lockdowns prematurely aged girls’ brains more than boys’, study finds. MRI scans found girls’ brains appeared 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years for boys.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/09/covid-lockdowns-prematurely-aged-girls-brains-more-than-boys-study-finds
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u/ttkciar Sep 09 '24 edited Sep 10 '24

It's worth pointing out that nowhere in this study do they mention filtering out or adjusting for incidences of SARS-CoV-2 infection in their subjects, and that other studies have demonstrated that cortical density loss is observed (also via MRI) after SARS-CoV-2 infection:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-52005-7

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(24)00080-4/fulltext

Given this, it seems odd to me that the researchers would jump to the conclusion that lockdown lifestyle changes (which were not even observed by many Americans) were the cause of this cortical thinning, and not SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Edited: I accidentally pasted the wrong link for the second study; sorry. The Lancet study was what I meant to link. Fixed it.

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u/mizushimo Sep 09 '24

Why would there be a gender difference if it was caused by a covid infection?

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u/autostart17 Sep 09 '24

Weird. I didn’t even think of Covid infection at first. I think, if talking about school aged children, being home without social interaction and social media are the likely culprits.

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u/AmusingVegetable Sep 09 '24

Same here, but wouldn’t lack of interaction show up as delayed development, instead of aging?

Spent months together with wife and kids, all doing remote work/school and it was gruesome, wouldn’t surprise me if that caused brain aging.

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u/Unicycldev Sep 09 '24

The reason they where home was a massive global pandemic that killed millions and injured millions more.

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u/autostart17 Sep 09 '24

Yeah, one likely funded by a grant from Dr. Anthony Fauci to EcoHealth Alliance, which was chosen to be spent in Wuhan as opposed to the many excellent labs we have here.

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u/Unicycldev Sep 09 '24

Doesn’t impact the relevance of considering the pandemic in this study.

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u/autostart17 Sep 09 '24 edited Sep 09 '24

Right. I should have instead addressed the fact that I don’t believe the longterm shutdown was necessary, particularly as relates to school aged children.

Furthermore, I think alternative forms of interaction for children should have been pursued by the covid funds.

This is really an experiment which we have no real comparable for in the history of humanity and pandemics.

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u/Unicycldev Sep 09 '24 edited Sep 09 '24

You can address “the fact” that you have an opinion about a topic unrelated to this study in other subs more tailored to the topics you want to raise. I’m sure you can find a politics sub easily.

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u/autostart17 Sep 09 '24

Well, it is relevant because it speaks to the decisions made by the federal government in a totality and how they relate to where we are today via the allegations of the study.

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u/Narren_C Sep 09 '24

No, it is not relevant.

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u/PaulCoddington Sep 09 '24

Children are not magically immune to CoViD.

The claim that they would not be harmed and would not spread the disease to others was concocted by anti-mitigation disinformation propagandists.

Certainly, there should have been plans in place for maintaining education (e.g. NZ switched to online schooling during the emergency).

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u/autostart17 Sep 09 '24

Children are not magically immune to anything. Children die every year due to pathogens picked up at school.

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u/bombmk Sep 09 '24

What would the pandemic need money for?

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u/FullyActiveHippo Sep 09 '24

The cause doesn't negate the effect though. Therefore, the cause is literally irrelevant in this particular discourse

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u/PaulCoddington Sep 09 '24

How many children live alone at home without Internet or electronic devices?

In what sense would being at home deprive them of mental and social activity?

Why has this never been a problem for correspondence and outback schools?

The claim that lockdowns comparable to the length of school vacations with full access to family, Internet, TV and online classes somehow stunted social and mental development has always come across as wildly implausible to me.

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u/Narren_C Sep 09 '24

Are you implying that the internet and electronic devices is a suitable replacement?

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u/Happy-North-9969 Sep 10 '24 edited Sep 10 '24

I think the implication is kids weren’t completely isolated, nor were they in lockdown for a long enough of a time period to do the kind of damage being attributed to it.

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u/PaulCoddington Sep 09 '24

Short term, I think yes

Seriously, the deprivation required to cause the brain to atrophy would have to be extraordinary. No one was in the equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber.

Correspondence and outback school kids have been doing OK for a very long time. Literally attending school by physical mail and radio, later Internet, etc.

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u/MissAnthropoid Sep 10 '24

Really? You think the likeliest culprit for causing brain damage in kids is that they missed school for a couple months to avoid a virus that causes brain damage? How is that likely? Why don't they come back from summer break brain damaged? They're not in school then either.

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u/autostart17 Sep 10 '24

I think social media has a profound effect on brains. It has been proven to have a more profound affect on female brains. We are still learning what short form content does to brains.

There are young kids who will watch TikTok for 8 hours straight. And brains looking older isn’t necessarily brain damage, but something which makes connections in their brains similar to those older children’s make.