So, you beautiful bastards. Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco show you daily dive into the news.

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if you like these big daily dives into the news, and let's jump into it.

Here's a fun fact and some news for you. The pandemic may have literally made you older.

Because while that period of time is something that my brain is just kind of put in a box and it

timed, I can't even remember that period. It's been well established that 2020 hit young people's

mental health hard, increasing anxiety, depression, eating disorders, behavioral problems,

suicidal thoughts, and more.

But now we've got this new study revealing how it actually transformed the physical structure of their brains in concerning ways.

Because it turns out you had these scientists at the University of Washington that happened to be a couple years deep into their research when the pandemic hit.

And with that, they were using MRIs to observe the brain development of 160

teens in the Seattle area. And so they decided, fuck it, let's refocus the study. Let's look at the

impact the lockdowns are having on brain structure. And they did this by measuring changes in the

thickness of the cerebral cortex, right? That outer layer of the tissue that makes you,

you being responsible for higher order reasoning and decision making. And they did this because it naturally thins as we age,

and chronic stress can speed up that process.

Between 2018 and 2021,

the researchers found much more than thinning in these teens than they expected.

With the brains of the boys prematurely aging 1.4 years,

and the brains of the girls prematurely aging a whole 4.2 years.

But these boys and these girls,

they didn't just have different amounts of thinning.

...