Jayati Ramakrishnan | (TNS) The Seattle Times SEATTLE — Being a teen during the first part of the COVID pandemic meant experiencing many milestones — the first day of high school, birthdays, graduation — from behind a computer screen. Pandemic isolation had a marked effect on young people. But a recent University of Washington study found teen girls were more adversely affected by the lockdown than teen boys, with girls’ brains aging more than three times as much.
Researchers say it’s not entirely clear what that could mean long-term for people who were teens during the early part of the pandemic. But in the immediate future, it could make teen girls more susceptible to anxiety and depression. Neva Corrigan, the lead researcher on the study, said it highlights the need for more mental health support.
“You don’t necessarily need to wait until a person develops a full-blown depressive episode or anxiety attack,” Corrigan said. “You can help prevent that by providing mental health support in the form of counseling, to help kids deal with their feelings.” Related Articles In 2018, researchers at UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences studied the brain scans of 160 people ages 9 to 17 with the intention of looking at changes in their brains over a two-year period.
When the pandemic hit, they had to wait an extra year to bring their subjects back. About 130 of them came back for the second scan. The researchers used the data of about 110 people from th.