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The Pandemic Might Have Changed Teens’ Brains

12.07.22
The Pandemic Might Have Changed Teens’ Brains (Getty Images)

ChicagoDid you know your brain aged faster during the pandemic? And by a lot more than you’d expect.

A study in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science and summarized by The Washington Post, compared scans of teen brains before the pandemic lockdown and afterwards, and it showed that our brains might have actually aged at least three years during that period.

Stanford University experts say that this was because of major levels of anxiety, depression, and fear. Before the coronavirus, this effect only happened when kids experienced lots of chronic childhood levels of stress, abuse, trauma, and neglect. This also raises our risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

This study was done by researchers conducting MRI scans on 220 children every two years, but it stopped once the pandemic hit. They used the opportunity to change the study and see how COVID-19 changed teens’ brains and these were the results that they found.

Read more …

This guest post is in partnership with True Star Media.

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