Didn't catch Covid? 'Surprising' finding suggests pandemic may still have harmed your health

It was a devastating time marked by death, fear and isolation for many – but those who didn’t catch Covid during the pandemic could at least count themselves somewhat lucky.

Now a study has discovered the crisis appears to have harmed brain health, even among people who were never infected. The strain on people’s lives – from weeks of isolation to uncertainty – may have aged the nation’s brains, academics suggest. Brain ageing during the pandemic was "more pronounced" among men, older people and those from deprived backgrounds, they found. Brain ageing models were trained on over 15,000 healthy people. They were then applied to nearly 1,000 people taking part in the UK Biobank study – long-term research tracking the health of middle and older aged adults.

Half of the group had brain scans before the pandemic, with the others having them before and after the global crisis. After looking at the scans, academics said that the pandemic "significantly" accelerated brain ageing. This was assessed by their brain age, as determined by the scans, compared with their actual age. On average, the scans taken after people had lived through the crisis had a "5.5-month higher deviation of brain age gap", the research team found.

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"We found that the Covid-19 pandemic was detrimental to brain health and induced accelerated brain ageing... regardless of SARS-CoV-2 infection," experts from the University of Nottingham wrote in the journal Nature Communications. Dr Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, who led the study, said: "What surprised me most was that even people who hadn't had Covid showed significant increases in brain ageing rates. It really shows how much the experience of the pandemic itself, everything from isolation to uncertainty, may have affected our brain health."

The team also examined whether having Covid-19 affected someone's cognitive performance by examining the results of tests taken at the time of the scans. People who were infected with the virus appeared to perform more poorly on cognitive tests when they were assessed again after the pandemic, they found.

Professor Dorothee Auer, senior author on the study, added: "This study reminds us that brain health is shaped not only by illness, but by our everyday environment. The pandemic put a strain on people's lives, especially those already facing disadvantage. We can't yet test whether the changes we saw will reverse, but it's certainly possible, and that's an encouraging thought."

In the UK, nearly 227,000 people died with Covid listed as a cause on their death certificate from March 2020 to May 2023. Last year, the Covid inquiry ’s first report found there were “several significant flaws” in the UK’s pandemic planning before the virus struck. Baroness Hallett, the inquiry’s chair, said the UK was “ill-prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus pandemic".