PANDEMIC BRAIN ðŸ§
What the pandemic did to teenager's brains
I know, I know, we’re tired of hearing about how the pandemic negatively affected mental health and loneliness skyrocketed etc., but scientists recently published a paper about some interesting brain changes.
The researchers didn’t set out to study the pandemic. The original purpose of the study was to evaluate longitudinal changes in brain structure during typical adolescence. Researchers planned to collect MRI data from adolescents at two-year intervals. The first brain scans were done in 2018. You know what happened next. The next set of scans were done in 2021 and early 2022.
What’d they find?
They found accelerated cortical thinning. Yikes. What does that mean?
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