Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
The brains of U.S. teens have physically changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, aging faster than normal, a new study says.
The young study participants also reported more severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and what scientists call internalized problems -- meaning feelings of sadness, low self-esteem and fear and trouble regulating their emotions -- after the first year of the pandemic.
Dozens of studies have found that teens' and adolescents' mental health has suffered during the pandemic. They have been taken out of school, away from their friends and familiar support structures, and had to live with the uncertainty and fear that came with the coronavirus. Many parents lost jobs. Millions of children lost parents and grandparents to COVID-19.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, is one of the first to look at the physical changes in the brain brought by that the stress and anxiety.
The research comes out of a larger study in which scientists were trying to understand the gender differences in depression among adolescents.
Eight years ago, they set out with a plan to take MRI scans of 220 children ages 9 to 13 every two years. The team had completed two sets of scans when the pandemic interrupted their research, and they weren't able to start scanning again until the end of 2020.
When their research was interrupted, the team decided it would be interesting to study the effects that this stressful event was having on kids' developing brains. The pre-pandemic scans would help them make this comparison.
The researchers matched children in the same demographics -- including gender, age, exposure to stress and socioeconomic status.
To find the average brain age, they put the MRI scans through a model that pools data from other scans.
The researchers compared the MRI scans of 128 children. Half the scans were taken before the pandemic and the other half at the end of 2020.
They found that the children who had lived through the first year of the pandemic had brain ages that were older than their chronological age.
The brains that had gone through the beginning of the pandemic had growth in the area that can help regulate fear and stress, called the amygdala, and in the hippocampus, the area of the brain that can controls access to memories. Tissues had thinned in the part of the brain that controls executive functioning, the cortex.
A child's brain changes naturally over time, but research has found that these physical changes can speed up when a person goes through significant adversity in childhood.
Studies have shown that people who are exposed to violence, neglect, poverty and family problems early in life have faster brain aging and can have problems with their mental health later on.
Ian Gotlib, lead author of the new study, said the research team had expected to find the problems with anxiety, depression and internalized problems. "The pandemic has not been kind to adolescent mental health," said Gotlib, a psychology professor at Stanford University.
But they weren't exactly sure what they would find with the MRI scans.
"It's always interesting to do research like this when you're not really sure what's going to happen," Gotlib said. "These effects were interesting and happened pretty quickly.
"This was just a one-year shutdown, so we didn't know that the effects on the brain would be this pronounced after that short a period of stress," he added. "It tracks with the mental health difficulties that we're seeing."
What isn't clear, he said, is whether the brain changes will have an impact later in life. The research team plans to scan the same kids later to track their brain development. There is a chance that their brain changes could have just been an immediate response to a stressor that will normalize over time, he said.
The team also plans to look at the 10 children in the study who had COVID-19 to see whether there is a different effect. The physical differences seem to be "a little more pronounced" in the children who had COVID, Gotlib said.
Dr. Max Wiznitzer, diversion chief of pediatric neurology at UH Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital, said the changes in the brain were interesting, but what's important is whether the mental health problems persist.
"The anatomy is not important. It's the functionality that's important," said Wiznitzer, who wasn't involved in the research. "The clinical consequence here is the functional impact, the mental health condition clinically and how it's functioning and how you deal with it."
With appropriate mental health interventions, problems like anxiety or depression can be managed. "The brain has that capacity for reorganization -- or call it improvement, if you will," Wiznitzer added.
Gotlib hopes parents and guardians keep in mind that although lockdowns and school closures may be over, the mental health consequences may be lingering.
"Be sure that your adolescent or your teen is getting any help that he or she, that they, might need if they're experiencing symptoms of depression, anxiety" or being withdrawn.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
The CFL suspended Toronto Argonauts quarterback Chad Kelly for at least nine regular-season games Tuesday following its investigation into a lawsuit filed by a former strength-and-conditioning coach against both the player and club.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.