--- title: COVID-19 Made Our Brains Age Faster description: A new study suggests that the pandemic took a toll on your brain even before you got infected. canonical: https://time.com/7304417/covid-19-brain-effects-aging/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-07-22T15:59:34.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-11T01:28:10.653Z article:section: Health og:title: COVID-19 Made Our Brains Age Faster og:description: A new study suggests that the pandemic took a toll on your brain even before you got infected. og:url: https://time.com/7304417/covid-19-brain-effects-aging/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta87eeddb930abebf/6998c884e2d64b3bc7c5f891/covid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2121 og:image:height: 1193 og:image:alt: covid-19 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: COVID-19 Made Our Brains Age Faster twitter:description: A new study suggests that the pandemic took a toll on your brain even before you got infected. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta87eeddb930abebf/6998c884e2d64b3bc7c5f891/covid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # COVID-19 Made Our Brains Age Faster > Sponsored content. 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Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators.  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jul 22, 2025 3:59 PM UTC  Computer graphic image of a virus as seen like through a microscope. Computer graphic image of a virus as seen like through a microscope. Yuichiro Chino—Getty Images  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jul 22, 2025 3:59 PM UTC COVID-19 is leaving all kinds of legacies on our health, both on our bodies and our brains. In a [study](https://press.springernature.com/resource/content/Full%20text:%2041467%5F2025%5F61033%5FOnlinePDF.pdf/51208946) published July 22 in _Nature Communications_, researchers report that living through the pandemic aged our brains—whether or not you were infected with COVID-19. To investigate COVID-19's impact on the brain, researchers looked at brain scans from 1,000 people during and before the pandemic. They compared these to brain scans from other people taken during "normal" times as a model for typical brain aging. Led by Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad from the University of Nottingham School of Medicine in the U.K., the researchers looked at measures like brain function, gray and white matter volume, a person's cognitive skills, and their chronological age. Gray matter is critical for memory, emotions, and movement, while white matter is essential for helping nerves transmit electrical signals. The pandemic-era brains aged about 5.5 months faster compared to the brains of those studied before the pandemic. The accelerated aging was documented in people who had COVID-19 infections as well as those who didn’t, which strongly suggests that pandemic-related factors other than biological or virus-driven ones—like [high stress](https://time.com/7008130/where-do-you-store-stress-in-body/)—were also at work. In fact, the changes in gray and white matter were similar in people who were and were not infected. “This finding was interesting and rather unexpected,” says Mohammadi-Nejad. Other studies have already shown that the COVID-19 virus can change the brain for the worse, but "we found that participants who simply lived through the pandemic period, regardless of infection, also showed signs of slightly accelerated brain aging. This highlights that the broader experience of the pandemic—including disruptions to daily life, stress, reduced social interactions, reduced activity, etc.,—may have had a measurable impact on brain health.” **Read More**: [_What to Know About the New COVID-19 Variant XFG_](https://time.com/7300451/new-covid-19-variant-xfg/) The impact of the pandemic seemed to be greater in certain groups—notably men, the elderly, and people with more compromised health, lower educational status and income, or unstable housing. People with less stable employment had an average of five months of additional brain aging compared to those with higher employment status, while poorer health added about four months of increased brain age compared to better health. However, only people infected with COVID-19 showed drops in cognitive skills. But the fact that those who weren’t infected during the pandemic also showed accelerated aging reflects the need to acknowledge the broader health effects of the pandemic beyond the obvious physical metrics on which doctors tend to focus. “Brain health can be influenced by everyday life activities, and major societal disruptions—like those experienced during the pandemic—can leave a mark even in healthy individuals,” Mohammadi-Nejad says. “This adds to our understanding of public health by reinforcing the importance of considering mental, cognitive, and social well-being alongside traditional physical health indicators during future crisis-response planning.” While the study did not explore specific ways to address brain aging, he says that strategies known to maintain brain health, such as a [healthy diet](https://time.com/7293570/most-nutritious-healthy-foods-dietitians/), exercise, [adequate sleep](https://time.com/6994478/how-much-sleep-do-you-need/), and social and cognitive interactions are important, especially in the context of stressful circumstances such as a pandemic. “Whether these can reverse the specific changes we observed remains to be studied,” he says. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/7304417/covid-19-brain-effects-aging/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/7304417/covid-19-brain-effects-aging/"},"headline":"COVID-19 Made Our Brains Age Faster","datePublished":"2025-07-22T15:59:34.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-11T01:28:10.653Z","description":"A new study suggests that the pandemic took a toll on your brain even before you got infected.","url":"https://time.com/7304417/covid-19-brain-effects-aging/","keywords":["Longevity","COVID-19"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta87eeddb930abebf/6998c884e2d64b3bc7c5f891/covid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Alice Park","jobTitle":"Senior Correspondent","url":"https://time.com/author/alice-park/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta87eeddb930abebf/6998c884e2d64b3bc7c5f891/covid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"covid-19","caption":"covid-19","creditText":"Yuichiro Chino—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/longevity/","name":"Longevity"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/7304417/covid-19-brain-effects-aging/","name":"COVID-19 Made Our Brains Age Faster"}}]}] ```