The idea that external forces are causing internal anxiety that manifests physically in your body isn’t exactly new. But a new study published in PNAS found that stress from the pandemic rapidly aged people at an epigenetic level, meaning they aged more quickly at a genetic level.
But it really affected only one group: young people, particularly teenagers.
Teens, with their still-forming brains, had such a hard time processing the traumas of not being able to go anywhere to protect the health and safety of themselves and those closest to them that the biological timers deep down in their DNA sped up.
Lead author Alicia Schowe and researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry analyzed saliva samples from over 1,000 German participants using four different epigenetic clocks. They tracked DNA methylation, the chemical tags along your genetic strands that regulate gene activity.
Pre- and post-lockdown data revealed that while physical health hits like weight gain and smoking bumped up aging metrics across the board, adolescents were the sole group whose subjective mental anguish directly turbocharged their biological clocks.
The Pandemic Did Some Real Damage to Teenagers
Puberty is already a dramatic mess of hormonal angst, but stripping away real-world social interaction made it all the worse on a biological level, leaving measurable genetic scars.
The broader Takeaway is one we knew before the pandemic, met face-to-face during it, and one many people refuse to acknowledge post-pandemic: large-scale societal crises hit vulnerable populations hardest. People already struggling in the lower socioeconomic strata or people with poor health suffered the worst epigenetic hits.
Scientists don’t yet know if this accelerated cellular aging leads to an earlier onset of age-related illnesses like cancer or diabetes. For now, keep an eye on your teenager and ask yourself: Are they acting like a divorced 45-year-old accountant more than usual? Because that might be the rapid biological aging at work.
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