Covid inquiry
Former civil servant who investigated Partygate says power-sharing executive was prone to silo working and leaks
Thu 16 May 2024 13.44 EDT
Northern Irelands government lacked cohesion and failed to be proactive during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Sue Gray, the former senior civil servant who investigated the Downing Street Partygate scandal.
Gray, who is now Keir Starmers chief of staff, said the power-sharing executive at Stormont was prone to silo working and leaks that would have been a terrible thing if replicated at Westminster.
She made the comments on Thursday on the last day of Covid inquiry hearings in Northern Ireland that exposed blunders, dysfunction and infighting between the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and Sinn Fin.
Three weeks of testimony from officials and politicians painted a damning picture of disarray and partisanship at the height of the pandemic, prompting a barrister for bereaved families to tell Stormont to bloody well get on and fix its flaws.
Michelle ONeill, the Sinn Fin first minister, and Arlene Foster, the former DUP first minister, admitted making mistakes, under questioning that was critical of their handling of the crisis.
Gray was the top official in Stormonts Department of Finance during the outbreak of Covid in early 2020 before transferring to the Cabinet Office in London in May 2021, making her the most senior official to have worked in both administrations during the pandemic.
The Stormont executive had just reformed after a three-year hiatus when the pandemic began, Gray said. Relationships were still being formed between ministers and the civil service, and the assembly was now back. I think it was a reactive nature.
Silo working was more pronounced at Stormont than Westminster and the executive struggled to contain leaks to the media, said Gray, who had been tasked with identifying the source. Asked what the reaction would be if such leaks were replicated at cabinet meetings in London, she said: I think that would be a terrible thing and it would be seen for that.
Gray said Stormont lacked defined rules on collective responsibility despite mandatory power sharing between nationalist and unionist parties, in contrast with London, where cabinet committees often resolved competing views. There tends to be a certain discipline, she said.
She lauded the great leadership of David Cameron and Nick Clegg in handling diverging views during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, when she worked in the Cabinet Office. It didnt break down in trust because actually it was a very honest and open and frank process.
Grays report on lockdown-breaking parties in and around Downing Street paved the way for Boris Johnsons resignation as prime minister in June 2022. Some Tories questioned her impartiality after she joined Labour and became Starmers chief of staff in the following year.
Her verdict on Stormont was mild compared with excoriations from Brenda Campbell KC, acting for the campaign group Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Northern Ireland.
In closing submissions, Campbell said three weeks of devastating evidence had lifted the lid on a dysfunctional system whose omissions, oversights and failures had cost lives. Sinn Fin ministers, including ONeill, caused hurt and anger by attending a big funeral for the leading IRA figure Bobby Storey amid Covid restrictions, Campbell said.
Earlier this week, ONeill, who was deputy first minister during the pandemic, apologised for attending the funeral. I am sorry for going, she told the inquiry. ONeill also faced criticism for following Irelands lead on school closures and deleting WhatsApp messages despite the head of Northern Irelands civil service telling her not to.
Campbell criticised the DUP, led at the time by Foster, for using a cross-community vote mechanism to block necessary measures supported by other parties. Its impossible to divorce that unedifying debacle in November 2020 from the chaos in the run-up to Christmas and from that shocking spike in deaths in early 2021, she said.
Campbell exhorted Stormont to reform and quoted a former Northern Ireland secretary: In the words of the late Mo Mowlam, the message from the Northern Ireland bereaved to those who represent us is now: Bloody well get on and do it.
Brenda Doherty, whose mother, Ruth Burke, died from Covid, said the evidence showed that political leaders sleepwalked into the pandemic. Despite the loudest possible alarms being sounded, our representatives failed to act.
The inquirys chair, Heather Hallett, said she hoped its stint in Belfast had covered core decision-making and governance and that the inquiry would look in further detail at care homes, test and trace, mental health impacts and other issues. The report will take some time and I make no apologies for that. Its too important to rush and so I ask people to bear with us.
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Covid-19 remained a bigger killer than the flu last winter, despite hopes the pandemic virus would eventually blend into the background with other respiratory germs that cause seasonal epidemics, a US study showed.
Patients hospitalised for Covid-19 had a 35 per cent higher risk of dying within 30 days than influenza patients, Ziyad Al-Aly and colleagues at the clinical epidemiology centre of the Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System in Missouri found.
Covid posed a 60 per cent higher mortality risk than flu in hospitalised patients during the 2022-2023 season, the same researchers showed last year.
The findings, published Wednesday in JAMA, should be interpreted in the context of nearly twice as many hospitalisations for Covid-19 compared with seasonal flu from October 2023 to March 2024, they said.
Although the death rate among Covid-19 patients declined to 5.7 per cent in that period from 6 per cent a year earlier, the study indicates that Covid-19s propensity to cause more damage outside the lungs still makes it a more dangerous pathogen, even as immunity to the virus builds.
We did the 2024 Covid-versus-flu rematch thinking that we may find that risk of death in Covid may have sufficiently declined to become equal with the risk of death from flu, Al-Aly told Bloomberg. But the reality remains that Covid carries a higher risk of death than the flu.
The findings were based on an analysis of electronic health records from US veterans across all 50 states. Although most Veterans Affairs users are older, white males, the data included hundreds of female and non-white patients.
Patients with either Covid-19 or flu hospitalised for another reason or those hospitalised for both illnesses were excluded from the study.
Among Covid-19 patients, there was no significant difference in the risk of dying before and during the period in which JN.1 predominated around Christmas 2023, suggesting that the Omicron subvariant may not have a materially different severity profile than those that immediately preceded it, the researchers said.
Overall, I think this means that we still need to take Covid seriously, Al-Aly said. Trivialising it as an inconsequential cold, as we often hear, doesnt mesh or align with reality.
itpow / iStock
A policy brief published yesterday by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies suggests antimicrobial resistance (AMR) policies need to take socioeconomic and sociocultural factors into account.
The brief notes that while efforts to understand AMR have focused on the biomedical model, interactions between socioeconomic and sociocultural determinants of health and AMR, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, have not been studied extensively. Among the factors the authors highlight are gender, living situations, healthcare access, educational access, poor governance, mobility, conflict, and climate change.
Although how these factors contribute to the spread of AMR are complex, the authors say that understanding them could inform development of interventions. Such interventions could address, for example, why women are more likely than men to experience exposure to drug-resistant infections and be prescribed antibiotics, why people in urban and overcrowded environments are associated with a higher risk of AMR, how limited access to healthcare can result in more inappropriate antibiotic use, and how human mobility and conflict can lead to the introduction and spread of new strains of drug-resistant organisms.
"Policy that understands these and the way they interact with one another will be more likely to achieve its aims," the authors write.
The brief suggests that a policy framework to respond to these socioeconomic and sociocultural factors should focus on antimicrobial stewardship, infection prevention and control, equitable access to diagnostics and effective treatments, and increased investment in incentives to stimulate research and development into new treatments. It should also be people-centered, multifactoral, and evidence-based and emphasize effective governance.
"There is increasing evidence of the critical role that socioeconomic and sociocultural factors play in driving AMR, shaping the health and economic impacts of AMR, and influencing the effectiveness of innovations and progress to tackle AMR at the individual, health system and societal level," the authors write. "It is essential that AMR policy takes these socioeconomic drivers and impacts into account moving forward."
WASHINGTON The U.S. Senate on Wednesday rejected efforts to roll back guidance from the Treasury Department regarding how state and local governments can spend funding approved by Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The46-49 voteon the Congressional Review Act resolution ended an attempt by several GOP senators to block the Biden administration from changing the definition of obligation as it relates to State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds and the timeline for spending some of that money.
Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt said during floor debate that the Treasury Departments change in guidance, which was released in November, was trying to pull a fast one on Congress.
Treasurys attempted sleight of hand to keep the COVID spending spigot on is an insult to Congress and those who believe in our Constitution, as well as a complete misuse of taxpayer dollars, Schmitt said.
The fund for state and local governments, Schmitt said, was intended to assist with revenue shortfalls tied to the COVID-19 pandemic and the law clearly stated that all costs incurred with money from this fund must be incurred by Dec. 31, 2024.
The interim final rule that the Treasury Departmentreleasedaround Thanksgiving extended that deadline by two years for administrative and legal costs, such as compliance costs and internal control requirements, he said.
This rule ensures that funding does not go to bridges or broadband, but to bureaucrats, Schmitt said.
Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden spoke against the CRA resolution during floor debate, saying it could have impacted 17 projects in Georgia, 160 in Michigan, 342 in Ohio, 50 in Arizona, 404 in Montana and 73 in West Virginia.
Nationwide there could be thousands of projects closed. Tens or even hundreds of jobs lost, Wyden said. This one is one of the most unusual votes that Ive seen recently, a true head scratcher.
Wyden said he didnt see a good reason for the United States Senate to backtrack on solid, bipartisan progress and have this chamber act in a way that leaves more of our nations infrastructure in a state of disrepair.
Schmitt said during a press conference before the vote that the claim the CRA resolution would have impacted projects already underway was a lie.
Essentially the obligations that are committed before the end of 2024, according to existing law, will be honored, Schmitt said. What this says is that you cant extend that out into 25 and 26. That was never the congressional intent here.
Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, also speaking at the GOP press conference, said the CRA resolution would claw back about $13 billion and went as far as calling it illegal spending.
The clock is going to run out, but Joe Biden is trying to circumvent the law once again, Marshall said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic is over and spending from those laws needs to wind down.
Schmitt introduced thetwo-page CRA resolutionin February along with Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Mike Braun of Indiana, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Marshall and Rick Scott of Florida.
The National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities and the Government Finance Officers Association urged lawmakers to vote against the CRA in a written statement released Wednesday before the vote.
The $350 billion SLFRF provided $65.1 billion to every city and county in America, and since 2021, localities have used these crucial resources to meet the unique needs of residents and support long-term economic prosperity, the statement read.
The three organizations wrote that the Treasury Departments interim final rule recognized the importance of flexibility in facilitating the effective rollout of recovery funds, including our ability to use funds for certain personnel costs and to re-obligate funds where necessary.
The White Housereleaseda Statement of Administration Policy on Wednesday, saying that President Joe Biden would veto the CRA had it reached his desk.
The CRA resolution, it said, could result in projects being canceled midstream, reduced project management and oversight, and higher costs as state and local governments are forced to contract out programs.
Nearly all SLFRF funds have been committed to projects, including infrastructure and disaster relief projects made eligible by bipartisan legislation, the SAP read. S.J. Res. 57 would create unnecessary uncertainty for recipients that are executing on projects, jeopardize important work underway, and inappropriately constrain Treasurys ability to address ongoing implementation issues.
Katherine E. Fleming-Dutra, MD
Lead, Vaccine Effectiveness and Policy Team, Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Virus Division, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia
Disclosure: Katherine E. Fleming-Dutra, MD, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
Wearing face masks may not have lowered the risk of COVID infection after the first Omicron wave, new research has shown. But that does not mean that face masks aren't useful, regardless.
The wearing of face masks on public transport and airplanes was federally mandated in the United States in February 2021 in a big to stop the spread of COVID-19. However, in April 2022, the mandate was ruled unlawful. But did it actually help stop the spread of the virus?
"Wearing face masks played a valuable role in reducing transmission of COVID during the first two years of the pandemic," Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., told Newsweek.
"By themselves, they were never going to be able to eliminate transmission, but they certainly reduced it. Very early in the pandemic we estimated, based on pre-COVID data, that if everyone wore masks we could reduce transmission by about 20 percent."
In late November 2021, the Omicron variant was first identified, becoming the dominant strain in U.S. by late December.
"Prior to Omicron in adults, never wearing a face mask at work was associated with an increased risk of testing positive of 25 to 30 percent over those always wearing one," Hunter said.
"[But] after the first wave of Omicron there was no significant difference in people always wearing a mask from those never wearing them and, in children, maybe even a slight reduced risk of testing positive if never wearing a mask."
In a new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, Hunter and colleagues from the University of East Anglia analyzed official data from the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics from November 2021 to May 2022 to explore how infection risk factors changed before and after the first Omicron wave. Risk factors included history of foreign travel, household size, employment status, contact with children and wearing a face mask.
"Early in the pandemic there were many studies published looking at risk factors for catching COVID, but far fewer studies after the first year or so," Hunter said. "Our research shows that there were changes in some risk factors around the time that the Omicron BA.2 variant became dominant."
In November 2021, always wearing a face mask at work, school or in enclosed spaces was associated with a reduced risk of COVID infection in both adults and children. However, after the first Omicron wave, it was not. So why did the masks suddenly stop working?
"If masks can reduce transmission by about 20 to 30 percent, then if the virus becomes much more infectious, as was the case with Omicron, 20 to 30 percent isn't going to ultimately be enough to slow the infection that much," Hunter said. "But the more important issue is that COVID does not generate long-lasting immunity."
He continued: "For highly infectious viruses like COVID with a short duration of immunity, once they have spread through the population once, then the number of infections that occur in a population are more affected by the rate at which immunity is lost [rather] than by changes in behavior intended to reduce exposure [like wearing masks.] And people who wore a mask really rigorously throughout the first two years will likely be more susceptible to infection [less immunity] than people who didn't."
But this doesn't mean that masks are completely useless. "There is good evidence that one of the factors behind how sick you get is the size of the dose of virus to which you are exposed," Hunter said. "So, one suggestion is that if you wear a mask and still catch COVID, you get a lower dose and so likely have less severe disease."
So does that mean we should all still be wearing face masks? "I think for most of us the answer is no," Hunter said. "Most of us have already had multiple COVID infections by now. But people who are at increased risk of severe disease may still benefit."
Do you have a tip on a health story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about COVID-19? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
A Chicago nurse has been liberated from her own mind, thanks to a brain-tapping technology called deep TMS.
Gulden, who requested to omit her surname for privacy reasons, worked as a nurse for more than 40 years before COVID-19 rocked the hospital system and took a toll on her mental health.
The mother of four worked at Advocate South Suburban Hospital in Hazel Crest, Illinois, as an ICU and ER nurse.
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In an interview with Fox News Digital, Gulden described the "massive chaos" that the 2020 coronavirus pandemic brought to the hospital.
"No matter what we did, it was like a failure," she said. "We were not prepared [for] the onslaught of patients."
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"The predictable outcome of coming in through the ER and leaving in a body bag was just devastating."
Despite her many years of medical work, New York City-born Gulden admitted that she "could not cope with it."
By Sept. 2020, she was a "different person," she said.
"I was on autopilot. I lived at work and when I came home, I was not functioning My organization and concentration skills were gone."
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"It was very, very unlike me, because I'm a single mom. I've raised four kids all by myself but I started to notice that I could not let go of what had transpired during the day."
Gulden told her primary care provider about her symptoms, including "horrible nightmares" that prevented her from sleeping and constant "weeping" that came "from her soul."
In the span of two years, the doctor prescribed Gulden eight different medications for sleep, PTSD and major depressive disorder, along with cognitive behavior therapy but nothing worked.
Even after the pandemic began to slow down, the nurse described how she hit a "spiral" when she realized COVID-19 created a "chain reaction."
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"[There] was a 51-year-old who had bilateral tumors and needed a mastectomy," she shared. "She'd gone through all her chemo and radiation, and she was ready for her mastectomy, but she had to wait like 11 months."
Added Gulden, "By the time she came back, her tumors had grown back, and that's when I was like, This is never going to be over."
Gulden mentioned that screenings for major health complications were down at least 84% during the pandemic, feeding into a "ripple" of patients who received care too late.
The nurse said through tears that she decided to leave the hospital and retire, since she "just couldnt function there."
After leaving, she fell into a "hibernation state" of sleeping 16 to 18 hours a day.
"The only reason I got up was to go to the bathroom," she said. "And I'm embarrassed to say I would go weeks without showering."
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"I lost 54 pounds I got to the point where I couldn't eat, because everything in the refrigerator reminded me of what was on patients trays."
Gulden's "incredibly vivid, horrible nightmares" continued along with other symptoms, including the inability to stay awake. She called it a "complete shutdown."
After Gulden spent three years in "hibernation," a friend introduced her to a new type of mental health treatment called deep TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) a magnetized tapping of the brain used to treat various disorders and diseases.
Gulden agreed to visit Dr. Teresa Poprawski, the chief medical officer of Relief Mental Health in Orland Park, Illinois, who helped "put the threads together" on what was triggering her PTSD and other symptoms.
Dr. Aron Tendler, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer of BrainsWay, a brain disorder treatment company, discussed how the therapy works in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Tendler is based in West Palm Beach, Florida and was not involved in Gulden's care. He said the brain is primarily an "electrochemical organ" that sends messages to different parts of the body.
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Most symptoms, including depression and anxiety, are controlled by changes in the brain, Tendler said, which can be treated electrically.
Deep TMS is a more "targeted" approach than electroshock therapy, he told Fox News Digital.
"Transcranial magnetic stimulation uses the principle of electromagnetic induction, where magnetic pulses induce an electrical current inside of neurons," he said.
"Essentially, we are changing the electrical activity in a group of neurons in an area of the brain."
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These magnetic pulses only stimulate a specific area of the brain for "a brief period of time," he said, with treatments lasting anywhere from six to 20 minutes. Patients undergo treatments for a series of days, depending on whats necessary.
Tendler described the therapy as a "learning experience" that changes "the state of the brain" through repetitive treatment.
Gulden received deep TMS treatments for five days a week, for six to eight weeks. She described the sensation as "tapping on specific parts of the brain."
After three weeks, she reported a noticeable difference in her cognitive state.
"I realized, Oh my gosh, its been three years since Ive heard the birds," she said. "I see life again. I see my flowers. Before, I couldnt even look at the flowers because they just reminded me of funerals."
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Gulden described her quality of life as "just so much better" since receiving treatment.
She still attends cognitive behavioral therapy sessions to hone her coping skills, she said.
"And if I need deep TMS again, I will be back there in a heartbeat," she added.
Gulden's goal is to teach others to not feel ashamed about seeking help for their mental health struggles.
"I want people to know that there are interventions," she said.
"The meds did not work for me. Had I not had this treatment today, I don't know where Id be."
Most patients experience a 40% to 50% improvement after four weeks of treatment, according to Tendler.
After completing a typical course of 36 treatments, patients have shown 75% to 80% improvement, he said.
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Deep TMS is "not a cure," Tendler said but many patients are able to regain normal function for months or years at a time.
The electrical therapy doesn't have the potential side effects that antidepressants and other treatments can cause, Tendler said, noting that the brain manipulation is "temporary."
"I know this might sound like a disadvantage, but it is also an advantage," he said. "We don't do anything to the person's brain that's permanent. We're changing the state of the brain temporarily."
He added, "Generally, we get you out of the state that you were in and then nature takes its course."
Deep TMS can also be paired with other medications, such as antidepressants, Tendler added.
Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel cautioned that deep TMS could potentially cause some cognitive and behavioral changes, but called it a "very useful tool" overall.
He told Fox News Digital that deep TMS is also "very useful for movement disorders like Parkinson's, with a high rate of success."
Siegel cautioned that deep TMS could potentially cause some cognitive and behavioral changes, but called it a "very useful tool" overall.
"[Deep TMS is] still being investigated for various purposes to interrupt aberrant nerve conduction," he said.
For other medical professionals suffering from mental health issues, Gulden stressed the importance of having a "healthy health care team," especially following the pandemic.
"I don't care how tough you think you are," she said. "You need to know what the signs are, and you need to know what treatments are available."
For more Health articles, visit foxnews.com.com/health.
Original article source: Chicago nurse is finally free of COVID-19-related PTSD and depression after electrical brain tapping therapy
Face masks have not been effective at preventing the spread of Covid-19 since at least February 2022, according to a new study from the University of East Anglia.
Mask mandates were in place well into spring that year, but masks did not lower the risk of Covid infection after the initial Omicron peak that February, researchers found. Before Omicron, masks could reportedly reduce transmission by about 19%, but afterwards there was no relationship between consistent masking and risk of infection.
The research also demonstrates a weak relationship between childhood masking and infections. While school-aged children who never masked were more likely to be infected up until February 2022, after that point those who didnt wear masks actually had a much lower likelihood of infection, though the difference was often statistically insignificant.
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New research from the University of East Anglia has found that wearing face masks did not lower the risk of COVID infection following the initial surge of the omicron variant.
The analysis of official data found that several risk factors for infection altered significantly as the dominant variant in the U.K. changed from delta to omicron in December 2021.
These included wearing a mask, a history of foreign travel, household size, whether people were working or retired, and contact with children or those over 70.
The study, "Changing risk factors for developing SARS-CoV-2 infection from Delta to Omicron," is published in PLOS ONE.
Lead author Professor Paul Hunter, of Norwich Medical School at the University of East Anglia (UEA), said, "Early in the pandemic there were many studies published looking at risk factors for catching COVID, but far fewer studies after the first year or so.
"Our research shows that there were changes in some risk factors around the time that the omicron BA.2 variant became dominant."
Co-author Dr. Julii Brainard, of UEA's Norwich Medical School, said, "This isn't totally surprising because laboratory evidence suggests that the omicron variant was better able to infect the cells lining the upper respiratory tract than previous variants and so be more transmissible.
"Management of infection risk needs to be agile, adapting to epidemic development and better-quality information when it emerges.
"To prevent infections we need to have a good view of which factors might be most or least relevant. If those factors can change, we need to be alert to that happening."
The researchers analyzed data available from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) COVID survey in England, which compared infection rates with an ongoing household survey of the population to estimate how many people had infections.
From November 2021 to May 2022, the ONS also asked people questions about their circumstances and habits to see if those factors could be linked to risk of positivity.
Professor Hunter added, "We used this dataset to look for constancy or change in the importance and direction of potential risk factors for testing positive. We applied a statistical method called meta-regression to do this."
The study found that changes to risk factors included:
Living in a house with five or more people was a risk at the beginning but by the end of the study period people in larger households (four and above) had negligibly greater risk than people living in singleton households.
Working in health or social care or in contact with others, was often found to be important in the first year of the pandemic, but was not associated with overall higher or changing risk of infection in the study period.
Being retired was associated with reduced risk compared to those in work overall, but any protective effect had disappeared by February 27, 2022, which coincided with the start of the second omicron wave.
The researchers said the balance of evidence is that wearing face coverings reduces transmission of respiratory infections in community settings and did reduce transmission of COVID-19. The question, however, is by how much.
Systematic review of pre-pandemic evidence and analysis of original survey data during the COVID-19 pandemic both indicated that mask wearing could or did reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by about 19%.
But these conclusions were derived mainly from data prior to the emergence of omicron variants.
This latest research found that prior to omicron BA.2, never wearing a mask was associated with an increased risk of around 30% in adults and 10% in children.
But by the second omicron wave (mid to late February 2022 onwards) there was no protective effect from mask wearing in adults and possibly an increased risk of infection in children.
Professor Paul Hunter commented, "It should not be a surprise that risk factors change during a pandemic due to a highly infectious disease with a short duration of immunity like COVID.
"So called SEIRS (Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Recovered, Susceptible) models of epidemics predict that as such an infection becomes endemic risk factors that powered the epidemic in its early stages become less important and the rate at which people lose immunity become more important in driving infection rates."
Dr. Brainard added, "A lot of potential risk factors for catching COVID didn't change during this period, and that's important to know too.
"We offer some possible explanations for why the changes may have happened, but we would need more focused research to understand for sure why there were changes in some risk factors."
More information: Changing risk factors for developing SARS-CoV-2 infection from Delta to Omicron, PLoS ONE (2024). research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/p -2-infection-from-de
Journal information: PLoS ONE
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The COVID-19 pandemic was challenging for many adolescents, disrupting their schooling and social/emotional development. Drawing on national data, a large study finds that how adolescents' brains were wired before the pandemic predicted their stress, negative emotions, and overall mental health during its height making them more vulnerable or more resilient.
The findings, reported in the journal Cerebral Cortex, could help target behavioral therapies to the brain circuits and functions most affected, says study leader Caterina Stamoulis, Ph.D., who heads the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Stamoulis and research assistant Linfeng Hu analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 2,600 adolescents averaging 12 years of age, collected an average of seven months before the pandemic. The data came from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study; adolescents with known neuropsychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorders were excluded.
From May 2020 to May 2021, when COVID-19 was at its peak, the ABCD study surveyed the adolescents every two to three months about their overall mental health. Stamoulis and Hu compared their responses against the fMRI data.
"We found that there were specific brain circuits whose organization could predict adolescents' survey responses," says Stamoulis.
Greater robustness of the brain's "salience network"which plays a central role in emotion, reward, and pain processing and regulationseemed to confer emotional resilience during the pandemic. And the researchers found that stronger, better organized connections between brain regions predicted better self-reported mental health.
Conversely, weaker and less robust connections in certain parts of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, were associated with higher stress and sadness during the pandemic. "The prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped in early adolescence and is actively undergoing changes, making it especially vulnerable to external stressors," Stamoulis notes.
Lower connectivity and strength of circuits involving the amygdala and thalamusboth linked to emotional processing and regulationalso predicted more stress and sadness. Findings were similar for circuits involving the basal ganglia and striatum, also linked to emotion processing. These structures and networks, too, are developing rapidly in adolescence.
"By identifying the prefrontal cortex as a vulnerable area, and the salience network as vulnerable, we have established specific circuits we can follow over time," says Stamoulis. "We know that these circuits support reward processing, emotional processing, pain, and motivating signals. Those functions could be targeted in designing behavioral therapies."
More information: Linfeng Hu et al, Strength and resilience of developing brain circuits predict adolescent emotional and stress responses during the COVID-19 pandemic, Cerebral Cortex (2024). DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhae164
Journal information: Cerebral Cortex
