This suggests that there is a close and dynamic association between the change in mental health and brain maturation. Our results show that those adolescents who had the least myelin growth in this impulse-related prefrontal area were the ones whose impulsivity worsened the most during adolescence. We not only looked at how impulsive individual adolescents were on average, but also at how they changed specifically over the course of our study. Moreover, we found that this reduced myelin growth was actually directly related to the worsening of mental health symptoms over time. Those who were particularly impulsive showed a reduced myelin-related growth in the prefrontal brain areas that have often been associated with impulse control. In our research, we found that myelin in the prefrontal cortex grows more slowly in adolescents who are struggling more with their mental health. The long-lasting brain development in the prefrontal cortex may also be behind the surge in mental health problems among teenagers. This may explain why teenagers sometimes struggle to use complex reasoning skills or why they act on impulse and take unnecessary risks. In other words, in adolescence, many of these sophisticated brain functions are still in development. This is the part of the brain that hosts the most sophisticated of our abilities – from making complex decisions to planning and suppressing unwanted urges. The prefrontal cortex, in particular, shows the most protracted development, lasting well into a person’s twenties. These changes are more accentuated in some areas of the brain than others, namely the ones hosting the higher-order cognitive functions. Myelin is a fatty substance that insulates the connections between cells and leads to better transmission of information. Scientists believe that a driving factor of this change is the growth of myelin. These changes in the brain indicate that the neural networks are further refining their functions and connections, getting rid of what is irrelevant and reinforcing what is important. However, newer brain imaging studies show that the brain does in fact mature past childhood and that these changes continue well into the twenties and thirties.ĭuring adolescence, the grey matter of the brain (where the nerve cells sit) is slowly shrinking, while white matter (the wiring between nerve cells) is still growing. Brain changesĪs recently as a few decades ago, it was still thought that the brain only grew during childhood and did not change much after that. We were able to assess not only how their brain develops during adolescence, but also how this was related to their evolving mental health. To this end, my colleagues and I recently undertook research following a group of teenagers over several years. One reason for this may be a lack of information on quite how the brain changes in adolescence. If mental health researchers have long been aware of this sharp rise in psychiatric illnesses, we still struggle to understand and explain why teenagers are so vulnerable to them. Suicide is one of the top five most common causes of death in adolescents. The impact of such illnesses is substantial. Diagnoses of psychiatric illnesses increase across the board, with teenagers suffering not only from mood disorders such as depression, but also from the most pervasive psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Mental health problems often emerge during adolescence, but it is still not fully understood why teenagers are so vulnerable to psychiatric illnesses, says Dr Tobias Hauser (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology).Īdolescence is the time when most mental health problems arise.
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