A new study is getting some attention, as it claims that the COVID-19 lockdown has affected peoples' brain structure. The work is a preprint, meaning that it hasn't been peer reviewed yet. It's available here.
To be clear, the new study is not saying that actual infection with the coronavirus has an effect on the brain. Rather, the study is about the impact of the whole COVID-19 experience in healthy people.
Researchers Tom Salomon and colleagues scanned 50 healthy volunteers in Israel. All of them were given an MRI scan between May and July of 2020, which was after the end of the original lockdown period in Israel. Crucially, all of the same volunteers had also been scanned before COVID started, mostly in 2019. (Presumably the original scans were part of a different study.)
By comparing the before and after-lockdown MRI scans of the same people, Salomon et al. found ...
