{"id":7593,"date":"2024-09-10T18:00:13","date_gmt":"2024-09-10T23:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=7593"},"modified":"2024-09-10T18:00:18","modified_gmt":"2024-09-10T23:00:18","slug":"teen-girls-brains-aged-rapidly-during-pandemic-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2024\/09\/10\/teen-girls-brains-aged-rapidly-during-pandemic-study-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"Teen Girls\u2019 Brains Aged Rapidly During Pandemic, Study Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/09\/09\/health\/teen-brains-pandemic-girls.html\">NYT<\/a> Neuroimaging found girls experienced cortical thinning far faster than boys did during the first year of Covid lockdowns. A study of adolescent brain development that tested children before and after coronavirus pandemic lockdowns in the United States found that girls\u2019 brains aged far faster than expected, something the researchers attributed to social isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The study from the University of Washington,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/cgi\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2403200121\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">published on Monday<\/a>&nbsp;in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured cortical thinning, a process that starts in either late childhood or early adolescence, as the brain begins to prune redundant synapses and shrink its outer layer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thinning of the cortex is not necessarily bad; some scientists frame the process as the brain rewiring itself as it matures, increasing its efficiency. But the process is known to accelerate in stressful conditions, and accelerated thinning&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/03\/25\/health\/25brain.html?searchResultPosition=2\">is correlated with depression<\/a>&nbsp;and anxiety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scans taken in 2021, after shutdowns started to lift, showed that both boys and girls had experienced rapid cortical thinning during that period. But the effect was far more notable in girls, whose thinning had accelerated, on average, by 4.2 years ahead of what was expected; the thinning in boys\u2019 brains had accelerated 1.4 years ahead of what was expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/09\/09\/health\/teen-brains-pandemic-girls.html\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<div style=\"display: none;\"><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"\/secure-location.php\" title=\"c KuqmzAHS NE\">c KuqmzAHS NE<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NYT Neuroimaging found girls experienced cortical thinning far faster than boys did during the first year of Covid lockdowns. A study of adolescent brain development that tested children before and after coronavirus pandemic lockdowns in the United States found that girls\u2019 brains aged far faster than expected, something the researchers attributed to social isolation. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychological-and-sociological-impact"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7594,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7593\/revisions\/7594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}