ArticleNature communications2025
Accelerated brain ageing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cognitive fatigue is related to reduced cerebral perfusion and sustained attention in patients with post COVID-19 condition: An fMRI study.Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Translational insights into Long-COVID: evaluation of preclinical animal models along the lung-brain-immune axis with focus on Golden Syrian Hamsters.Journal of neuroinflammation · 2026Review
- The exposome of brain aging across 34 countries.Nature medicine · 2026Article
- Unmasking the hidden catalyst: How infections trigger Alzheimer's disease.Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD · 2026Review
- Multilayer metabolomic integration reveals bioenergetic disruption in Long COVID.Journal of translational medicine · 2026Article
- Neurological diversity and generalizability: building on AMPA receptor imaging advances in long COVID.Brain communications · 2026Article
- Population diversity validation for Alzheimer's disease "unifying" models.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- Post-Acute COVID-19 Effects on Diagnostic Conversion Rates And Standardized Cognitive and Motor Test Scores in a Longitudinal Study of Independent, Community-Recruited Elderly Subjects.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Mental Health and Cognitive Outcomes in Patients Six Months After Testing Positive Compared with Matched Patients Testing Negative for COVID-19 in a Non-Hospitalized Sample: A Matched Retrospective Cohort Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The impact of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic on brain health is recognised, yet specific effects remain understudied. We investigate the pandemic's impact on brain ageing using longitudinal neuroimaging data from the UK Biobank. Brain age prediction models are trained from hundreds of multi-modal imaging features using a cohort of 15,334 healthy participants. These models are then applied to an independent cohort of 996 healthy participants with two magnetic resonance imaging scans: either both collected before the pandemic (Control groups), or one before and one after the pandemic onset (Pandemic group). Our findings reveal that, even with initially matched brain age gaps (predicted brain age vs. chronological age) and matched for a range of health markers, the pandemic significantly accelerates brain ageing. The Pandemic group shows on average 5.5-month higher deviation of brain age gap at the second time point compared with controls. Accelerated brain ageing is more pronounced in males and those from deprived socio-demographic backgrounds and these deviations exist regardless of SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, accelerated brain ageing correlates with reduced cognitive performance only in COVID-infected participants. Our study highlights the pandemic's significant impact on brain health, beyond direct infection effects, emphasising the need to consider broader social and health inequalities.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.