A new study from Stanford University suggests that pandemic-related stressors have physically altered adolescents’ brains, making their brain structures appear several years older than the brains of comparable peers before the pandemic. The study (read below) was published on Dec. 1, 2022, in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.
In 2020 alone, reports of anxiety and depression in adults rose by more than 25 percent compared to previous years. The new findings indicate that the neurological and mental health effects of the pandemic on adolescents may have been even worse.
“We already know from global research that the pandemic has adversely affected mental health in youth, but we didn’t know what, if anything, it was doing physically to their brains,” said Ian Gotlib, the Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor of Psychology in the School of Humanities & Sciences, who is the first author on the paper.
Changes in brain structure occur naturally as we age, Gotlib notes. Dur...
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