A study conducted by researchers from Stanford and California Universities in San Francisco concluded that the pandemic had “accelerated” some of the reorganization and thinning of the cortex and an increase in the volume of the hippocampus and parts of the amygdala in the brain, according to the journal “Science Alert”.
“We already knew from global research that the pandemic had negatively affected the mental health of young people, but we didn’t know what it was doing physically to their brains,” said psychologist Ian Gottlieb, director of the Stanford Institute for Neurodevelopment and the Psychopathology Laboratory in California, reports a local Arabic daily.
The team looked at brain MRI scans of 81 individuals before the pandemic, and 82 individuals during the pandemic after lockdown restrictions were eased.
After matching individuals from both groups using factors including gender, age, ethnicity, life stressors, and socioeconomic background, to give them multiple points of comparison, the survey showed that the brain aging process accelerated in the post-pandemic group. Shutdown periods of less than a year resulted in the equivalent of three years of brain aging.
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