| Popis: |
COVID-19, the world pandemic of a new type of Coronavirus, has infected over the past few months millions of people with devastating numbers of deaths. Starting March 2020, one after the other countries have closed their borders and implemented a series of ad-hoc laws and orders that were aimed at restricting the spread of the disease and cutting the chain of infection. These ad-hoc laws and orders received the common name: lockdown, restricting the freedom and leisure activities of the population leading to a worldwide financial crisis and soaring unemployment rates concerning millions worldwide. The current study was an unplanned one that started as a reaction to the COVID-19 lockdown. The aim of this study is to test the neural changes following the COVID-19 extreme lockdown period in the brain - which brain regions, if any, are affected by the lockdown. For this purpose, following the end of lockdown in Israel, we scanned participants that were scanned prior to the lockdown for other research purposes and compared their anatomical brain scans to test for changes in cortical and subcortical volumes and connectivity (both functional and structural). |
