Genetic vulnerability appears to have amplified the pandemic’s toll on teen mental health

A recent study provides evidence that adolescent mental health declined markedly during the COVID-19 pandemic, with youth who carry a genetic predisposition for psychiatric conditions experiencing an even greater overall burden of symptoms. The findings indicate that the environmental stressors of the pandemic caused lasting emotional and behavioral difficulties, particularly for adolescent girls. The research was published in Translational Psychiatry.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced widespread disruptions, including school closures, social isolation, and shifted daily routines. These rapid lifestyle changes took a heavy toll on young people worldwide. For example, a 2021 meta-analysis found that rates of clinically elevated depression and anxiety symptoms among children and teenagers roughly doubled across the globe during the first year of the pandemic. Researchers have been trying to understand why some adolescents adapted to these changes over time while others experienced worsening psychological health.

Psychiatric conditions are known to have a strong hereditary component, meaning genetic differences play a role in how adolescents handle environmental stress. A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that a higher shared genetic risk across various psychiatric conditions was strongly associated with a persistent pattern of high depressive symptoms throughout adolescence. To measure this inherited risk, scientists often use polygenic risk scores. These scores combine the small effects of thousands of genetic variations into a single number to estimate an individual’s broad biological susceptibility to mental health conditions.

“We are particularly interested in the impact of social isolation on adolescents’ health,” said Chun Chieh Fan of the Center for Population Neuroscience and Genetics at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. “While there were many studies reporting the crisis among youth, there was limited discussion on who is most susceptible.”

To identify these at-risk groups, Fan and co-lead author Lucy Shao of the University of California San Diego analyzed data from 10,374 adolescents. The participants were drawn from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a large ongoing project tracking child development in the United States. The youth were between 10 and 14 years old in 2020.

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The researchers tracked 20 different measures of mental health over five assessment waves. These visits covered the period before the pandemic, the early pandemic in 2020, and the late pandemic extending into early 2022.

The team calculated four distinct polygenic risk scores for each participant based on past genetic research in adults. These scores estimated the genetic likelihood of compulsive disorders, psychotic disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, and internalizing conditions like depression and anxiety. By comparing these scores with parent-reported and self-reported mental health surveys, the scientists could track how symptom levels changed over time in relation to each participant’s genetic profile.

The findings indicate that the pandemic was associated with broad increases in psychological distress. During the early pandemic, symptom scores across various mental health measures increased by 4% to 14% compared to pre-pandemic levels. Symptoms tended to remain elevated during the late pandemic period, ranging from 6% to 24% above early pandemic levels. Specifically, parent-reported withdrawn behavior, depression, and rule-breaking increased, as did self-reported internalizing problems.

Genetic predispositions also played a distinct role in symptom severity. For every one-unit increase in a participant’s neurodevelopmental or internalizing polygenic risk score, they experienced between a 3% and 21% increase in symptoms across most mental health categories.

“The COVID pandemic imposed a long-term impact on youth, especially when the disruptions lingered over years,” Fan told PsyPost. “The cumulative stress compounded upon those who are particularly vulnerable, emerging a wide range of behavioral issues among youth.”

The researchers noticed marked differences when separating the data by sex. Female adolescents exhibited a greater increase in mental health challenges during the early pandemic, including a 25% increase in parent-reported affective problems. In contrast, male adolescents showed a smaller initial bump in symptoms that tended to stabilize or even decrease during the later pandemic stages. Female participants with a high genetic risk for neurodevelopmental conditions also experienced a larger increase in conduct problems and aggressive behavior during the early pandemic.

These results are in line with research covered by PsyPost earlier this year, which found that the global population-level burden of mental disorders surged among children and teens during the pandemic. That earlier study, which modeled broad disorder prevalence rather than tracking specific symptom scores in a cohort, similarly noted that female youth experienced the largest increases in anxiety and depression.

The study has some limitations to consider. The polygenic risk scores used by the researchers are broad statistical tools designed to measure traits across a large population. They are not diagnostic tests and cannot predict individual behavior or clinical outcomes for a specific child. The genetic data primarily relied on models derived from adults, which might not perfectly capture how mental health conditions develop during early adolescence.

The calendar-based periods used to define the pandemic phases do not isolate the specific causes of adolescent distress. Increased symptoms could be tied to school closures, financial strain at home, fear of infection, or physical health changes, but the data cannot separate these intertwined factors. The researchers also adjusted for age, but because adolescence is a period of rapid emotional change, normal developmental shifts might still overlap with pandemic-related trends.

Future studies could focus on identifying which specific pandemic disruptions had the strongest impact on adolescent well-being. Researchers might also examine protective factors in the home or community that help mitigate mental health risks. Expanding genetic research to include more diverse ancestral populations would help ensure that these scientific models accurately reflect the experiences of all youth.

The study, “Contributions of Genetic Liability and the COVID-19 Pandemic to Rising Psychopathology Among Youth in the United States,” was authored by Lucy Shao, Jonathan Ahern, Robert Loughnan, Bohan Xu, Holly E. Baker, Susan F. Tapert, Fiona C. Baker, Wesley K. Thompson, Orsolya Kiss, Eva M. Müller-Oehring, Marie Gombert-Labedens, and Chun Chieh Fan.