Preliminary Study Of Brain Function Under The Influence Of Wearing Mask

A new type of novel coronavirus pneumonia in early 2020 has continued to the present,greatly affecting the normal work and life of people all over the world.As we all know,wearing a mask has been proven to be able to effectively stop the spread of viruses and other droplets,which is very important to slow down the spread of COVID-19.Therefore,wearing a mask has almost become a compulsory measure in China since2020.Wearing masks has undoubtedly triggered a series of discussions,such as whether wearing masks for a long time has an impact on human physiology? Does wearing a mask affect people's emotional cognitive function? It is necessary to collect f MRI data of subjects in scientific research work.Does wearing a mask have a significant impact on brain activity and thus affect data collection? These problems need to be discussed urgently.In this study,we collected the f MRI data of 37 healthy participants wearing general surgical masks.Finger movement,emotional face matching,working memory task and resting-state activation were studied.The blood oxygen saturation before and after scanning with and without masks was measured.Compared with the period without masks,the blood oxygen saturation during wearing masks showed a lower level.Although the activation with and without masks was similar,the correlation between evoked response reflecting task activation and resting state was usually low when wearing masks.The resting function network connection is weakened when wearing a mask compared with not wearing a mask.The task-based ROI analysis also proved that the signal change was weakened when wearing masks.Under the condition of wearing masks,the blood oxygen saturation before and after scanning may reflect subtle changes,which is related to the high sensitivity of BOLD signal.There is no significant difference in the overall signal of the whole brain under the two conditions.The areas where there are relative differences between resting state and task state under the two conditions may be driven by some potential psychological effects.Although the oxygen content decreases slightly,this may not affect the overall performance.Therefore,neural changes may reflect a decrease in oxygen,but the brain can cope with this situation,or the brain can compensate for this by performing higher activities in some core areas of the task-related network.