Telling Familiar Stories Can Help Brain Injury

Telling Familiar Stories Can Help Brain Injury.
Hearing their loved ones carry weight overfree stories can help brain injury patients in a coma regain consciousness faster and have a better recovery, a restored study suggests. The study included 15 masculine and female brain injury patients, average age 35, who were in a vegetative or minimally alert state. Their brain injuries were caused by car or motorcycle crashes, blow up blasts or assaults. Beginning an average of 70 days after they suffered their brain injury, the patients were played recordings of their kindred members telling familiar stories that were stored in the patients' long-term memories.

The recordings were played over headphones four times a epoch for six weeks, according to the turn over published Jan. 22 in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair. "We believe hearing those stories in parents' and siblings' voices exercises the circuits in the perceptiveness responsible for long-term memories," haunt author Theresa Pape, a neuroscientist in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University's School of Medicine in Chicago, said in a university copy release.

The Martial Arts Can Damage The Brain

The Martial Arts Can Damage The Brain.
Another contemplate supports the impression that repeated blows to the head in boxing or the martial arts can damage the brain. The study, led by Dr Charles Bernick of the Cleveland Clinic, included virtuoso fighters - 93 boxers and 131 varied martial arts experts. They ranged in period from 18 to 44, and were compared against 22 people of similar age with no the past of head injuries. The amount of time the boxers and martial arts combatants had depleted as professional fighters ranged from zero to 24 years, with an average of four years, Bernick's set said.

The number of professional matches they'd had ranged from zero to 101, with an mean of 10 a year. MRI brain scans and tests of memory, reaction time and other mental abilities showed that the fighters who had suffered repeated blows to the head had smaller brain volume and slower processing speeds, compared to non-fighters. While the reading couldn't prove cause-and-effect, the stuff were evident at a relatively young age and tied to a higher risk of thinking and memory problems, the Cleveland researchers said.

How To Help Promote Healthy Brain Aging

How To Help Promote Healthy Brain Aging.
A gene deviant believed to "wire" colonize to live longer might also ensure that they keep their wits about them as they age, a experimental study reports. People who carry this gene variant have larger volumes in a pretext part of the brain involved in planning and decision-making, researchers reported Jan 27, 2015 in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology. These folks performed better on tests of working celebration and the brain's processing speed, both considered terrific measures of the planning and decision-making functions controlled by the understanding region in question. "The thing that is most exciting about this is this is one of the first genetic variants we've identified that helps kick upstairs healthy brain aging," said study lead framer Jennifer Yokoyama, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

She notable that genetic research has mainly focused on abnormalities that cause diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The gene involved, KLOTHO, provides the coding for a protein called klotho that is produced in the kidney and intellect and regulates many processes in the body, the researchers said. Previous delving has found that a genetic variation of KLOTHO called KL-VS is associated with increased klotho levels, longer lifespan and better sensitivity and kidney function, the look authors said in background information.

About one in five people carries a solitary copy of KL-VS, and enjoys these benefits. For this study, the researchers scanned the healthy brains of 422 men and women age-old 53 and older to see if having a single copy of KL-VS false the size of any brain area. They found that people with this genetic variation had about 10 percent more book in a brain region called the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Synthetic Oil May Help With Brain Disorder

Synthetic Oil May Help With Brain Disorder.
Consuming a false lubricator may help normalize brain metabolism of people with the incurable, inherited brain disarrange known as Huntington's disease, a small new study suggests. Daily doses of a triglyceride lubricant called triheptanoin - which 10 Huntington's patients took with meals - appeared to improve the brain's ability to use energy. The scientists also noted improvements in moving parts and motor skills after one month of therapy. Huntington's is a fatal disease causing the progressive destruction of nerve cells in the brain.

Both the study's author and an outside expert cautioned that the new findings are advance and need to be validated in larger studies. Triheptanoin oil "can cross the blood-brain fence and improve the brain energy deficit" common in Huntington's patients, said workroom author Dr Fanny Mochel, an associate professor of genetics at Pitie-Salpetriere University Hospital in Paris. "We be sure the gene mutation for Huntington's is present at birth and a key quiz is why symptoms don't start until age 30 or 40.

It means the body compensates for many years until aging starts. So if we can facilitate the body compensate. it may be easier to see the delay of disease onset rather than slow the disease's progression". The chew over was published online Jan. 7 in the journal Neurology. About 30000 Americans manifest symptoms of Huntington's, with more than 200000 at risk of inheriting the disorder, according to the Huntington's Disease Society of America.

Each young gentleman of a parent with Huntington's stands a 50 percent betide of carrying the faulty gene. The disorder causes uncontrolled movements as well as emotional, behavioral and intellectual problems. Death usually occurs 15 to 20 years after symptoms begin. Mochel and her gang broke the study into two parts. In the first part, they worn MRI brain scans to analyze brain energy metabolism of nine people with at Huntington's symptoms and 13 healthy people before, during and after they viewed images that stimulated the brain.

Doctors Recommend Control Cholesterol Levels

Doctors Recommend Control Cholesterol Levels.
Keeping "bad" cholesterol in inspect and increasing "good" cholesterol is not only tolerable for your heart, but also your brain, new research suggests. A contemplation from the University of California, Davis, found that low levels of "bad" (LDL) cholesterol and excessive levels of "good" (HDL) cholesterol are linked to lower levels of so-called amyloid marker in the brain. A build-up of this plaque is an indication of Alzheimer's disease, the researchers said in a university word release.

The researchers suggested that maintaining healthy cholesterol levels is just as important for cognition health as controlling blood pressure. "Our study shows that both higher levels of HDL and earlier levels of LDL cholesterol in the bloodstream are associated with lower levels of amyloid plaquette deposits in the brain," the study's lead author, Bruce Reed, associate director of the UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Center, said in the report release. "Unhealthy patterns of cholesterol could be later causing the higher levels of amyloid known to contribute to Alzheimer's, in the same way that such patterns strengthen heart disease".

The study, which was published in the Dec 30, 2013 online print run of the journal JAMA Neurology, involved 74 men and women recruited from California tap clinics, support groups, senior-citizen facilities and the UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Center. All of the participants were old 70 or older. Of this group, three people had meek dementia, 33 had no problems with brain function and 38 had mild impairment of their brain function.

Music Helps To Restore Memory

Music Helps To Restore Memory.
You conscious those popular songs that you just can't get out of your head? A imaginative study suggests they have the power to trigger strong memories, many years later, in colonize with brain damage. The small study suggests that songs instill themselves irrevocably into the mind and may help reach people who have trouble remembering the past. It's not unblocked whether the study results will lead to improved treatments for patients with brain damage.

But they do suggest new insight into how people process and remember music. "This is the first study to show that music can oust to mind personal memories in people with severe brain injuries in the same way that it does in bracing people," said study lead author Amee Baird, a clinical neuropsychologist. "This means that music may be worthwhile to use as a memory aid for people who have difficulty remembering personal memories from their late after brain injury".

Baird, who works at Hunter Brain Injury Service in Newcastle, Australia, said she was inspired to embark upon the study by a man who was severely injured in a motorcycle accident and couldn't think back on much of his life. "I was interested to see if music could help him bring to mind some of his personal memories. The houseboy became one of the five patients - four men, one woman - who took share in the study.

One of the others was also injured in a motorcycle accident, and a third was hurt in a fall. The settled two suffered damage from lack of oxygen to the brain due to cardiac arrest, in one case, and an attempted suicide in the other. Two of the patients were in their mid-20s. The others were 34, 42 and 60. All had reminiscence problems. Baird played loads one songs of the year for 1961 to 2010 as ranked by Billboard munitions dump in the United States.

Increased Weight Reduces The Brain's Response To Tasty Food

Increased Weight Reduces The Brain's Response To Tasty Food.
Most society unquestionably find drinking a milkshake a pleasurable experience, sometimes authoritatively so. But apparently that's less apt to be the case among those who are overweight or obese.

Overeating, it seems, dims the neurological effect to the consumption of yummy foods such as milkshakes, a new study suggests. That retort is generated in the caudate nucleus of the brain, a region involved with reward.

Researchers using running magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) found that that overweight and obese people showed less activity in this brain ambit when drinking a milkshake than did normal-weight people.

"The higher your BMI [body mass index], the bring your caudate response when you eat a milkshake," said study lead author Dana Small, an collaborator professor of psychiatry at Yale and an associate fellow at the university's John B. Pierce Laboratory.

The cause was especially strong in adults who had a particular variant of the taqIA A1 gene, which has been linked to a heightened chance of obesity. In them the decreased brain response to the milkshake was very pronounced. About a third of Americans have the variant.

The findings were to have been presented earlier this week at an American College of Neuropsychopharmacology appointment in Miami.

Just what this says about why public overeat or why dieters say it's so hard to pass over highly rewarding foods is not entirely clear. But the researchers have some theories.

When asked how pleasant they found the milkshake, overweight and obese participants in the study responded in ways that did not differ much from those of normal-weight participants, suggesting that the explication is not that obese people don't enjoy milkshakes any more or less.

And when they did brain scans in children at jeopardy for obesity because both parents were obese, the researchers found the opposite of what they found in overweight adults.

Children at peril of obesity actually had an increased caudate response to milkshake consumption, compared with kids not considered at danger for obesity because they had lean parents.

What that suggests, the researchers said, is that the caudate response decreases as a effect of overeating through the lifespan.

"The decrease in caudate response doesn't precede weight gain, it follows it. That suggests the decreased caudate comeback is a consequence, rather than a cause, of overeating."

Studies in rats have had like results, said Paul Kenny, an associate professor in the behavioral and molecular neuroscience lab at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.

Study Of Helmets With Face Shields

Study Of Helmets With Face Shields.
Adding mush shields to soldiers' helmets could condense brain damage resulting from explosions, which account for more than half of all combat-related injuries prolonged by US troops, a new study suggests. Using computer models to simulate battlefield blasts and their junk on brain tissue, researchers learned that the face is the pipeline pathway through which an explosion's pressure waves reach the brain. According to the US Department of Defense, about 130000 US repair members deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq have sustained blast-induced distressing brain injury (TBI) from explosions.

The addition of a face shield made with transparent armor corporeal to the advanced combat helmets (ACH) worn by most troops significantly impeded direct bellow waves to the face, mitigating brain injury, said lead researcher Raul Radovitzky, an allied professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "We tried to assess the physics of the problem, but also the biological and clinical responses, and tie down it all together," said Radovitzky, who is also associate commandant of MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. "The key thing from our point of view is that we truism the problem in the news and thought maybe we could make a contribution".

Researching the issue, Radovitzky created computer models by collaborating with David Moore, a neurologist at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC Moore Euphemistic pre-owned MRI scans to simulate features of the brain, and the two scientists compared how the mastermind would retort to a frontal denounce wave in three scenarios: a head with no helmet, a head wearing the ACH, and a headmaster wearing the ACH plus a face shield. The sophisticated computer models were able to put together the force of blast waves with skull features such as the sinuses, cerebrospinal fluid, and the layers of gray and bloodless matter in the brain. Results revealed that without the face shield, the ACH slightly delayed the gale wave's arrival but did not significantly lessen its effect on brain tissue. Adding a face shield, however, considerably reduced forces on the brain.

New Treatments Hyperactivity Teenagers

New Treatments Hyperactivity Teenagers.
A newer MRI structure can scent low iron levels in the brains of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The process could help doctors and parents make better informed decisions about medication, a new study says. Psychostimulant drugs old to treat ADHD affect levels of the brain chemical dopamine. Because iron is required to modify dopamine, using MRI to assess iron levels in the cognition may provide a noninvasive, indirect measure of the chemical, explained study author Vitria Adisetiyo, a postdoctoral analysis fellow at the Medical University of South Carolina.

If these findings are confirmed in larger studies, this artistry might help improve ADHD diagnosis and treatment, according to Adisetiyo. The organization might allow researchers to measure dopamine levels without injecting the patient with a substance that enhances imaging. ADHD symptoms encompass hyperactivity and difficulty staying focused, paying attention and controlling behavior.

Both Medications And Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery May Make Better Life With Parkinson'S Disease

Both Medications And Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery May Make Better Life With Parkinson'S Disease.
Parkinson's disorder patients do better if they stand engaged brain stimulation surgery in addition to treatment with medication, new research suggests. One year after having the procedure, patients who underwent the surgery reported better rank of life and improved capability to get around and engage in routine daily activities compared to those who were treated with medication alone, according to the enquiry published in the April 29 online edition of The Lancet Neurology.

The study authors distinguished that while the surgery can provide significant benefits for patients, there also is a risk of serious complications. In astute brain stimulation, electrical impulses are sent into the brain to adjust areas that control movement, according to history information in a news release about the research. In the new study, Dr Adrian Williams of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham and colleagues in the United Kingdom randomly assigned 366 Parkinson's malady patients to either away with drug treatment or drug treatment gain surgery.

One year later, the patients took surveys about how well they were doing. "Surgery is likely to last an important treatment option for patients with Parkinson's disease, especially if the way in which deep brain stimulation exerts its remedial benefits is better understood, if its use can be optimized by better electrode placement and settings, and if patients who would have the greatest gain can be better identified," the authors concluded.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a surgical procedure hand-me-down to treat a variety of disabling neurological symptoms—most commonly the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson's c murrain (PD), such as tremor, rigidity, stiffness, slowed movement, and walking problems. The tradition is also used to treat essential tremor, a common neurological movement disorder.

Excess Weight Is Not The Verdict

Excess Weight Is Not The Verdict.
For the senior time, researchers have shown that implanting electrodes in the brain's "feeding center" can be safely done - in a tender to lay open a new treatment option for severely obese people who fail to shed pounds even after weight-loss surgery. In a beginning study with three patients, researchers in June 2013 found that they could safely use the therapy, known as acute brain stimulation (DBS). Over almost three years, none of the patients had any important side effects, and two even lost some weight - but it was temporary. "The sooner thing we needed to do was to see if this is safe," said lead researcher Dr Donald Whiting, depravity chairman of neurosurgery at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.

And "We're at the point now where it looks groove on it is". The study, reported in the Journal of Neurosurgery and at a meeting this week of the International Neuromodulation Society in Berlin, Germany, was not meant to examine effectiveness. So the big remaining subject is, can deep brain stimulation actually promote lasting weight loss?

"Nobody should get the end that this has been shown to be effective. This is not something you can go ask your doctor about". Right now, deep wit stimulation is sometimes used for tough-to-treat cases of Parkinson's disease, a movement disorder that causes tremors, howling muscles, and balance and coordination problems. A surgeon implants electrodes into delineated movement-related areas of the brain, then attaches those electrodes to a neurostimulator placed under the skin near the collarbone.

The neurostimulator continually sends infinitesimal electrical pulses to the brain, which in turn interferes with the perverse activity that causes tremors and other symptoms. What does that have to do with obesity? In theory deep planner stimulation might be able to "override" brain signaling involved in eating, metabolism or feelings of fullness.

Research in animals has shown that electrical stimulation of a thorough area of the brain - the lateral hypothalamic area - can drive weight loss even if calorie intake stays the same. The new consider marks the first time that deep brain stimulation has been tried in that brain region. And it's an high-level first step to show that not only could these three severely obese people get through the surgery, but they also seemed to have no not joking effects from the brain stimulation, said Dr Casey Halpern, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pennsylvania who was not interested in the research.

Hypothyroidism Affects The Brain

Hypothyroidism Affects The Brain.
Hypothyroidism, a state that causes low or no thyroid hormone production, is not linked to tractable dementia or impaired brain function, a new weigh suggests. Although more research is needed, the scientists said their findings add to mounting testimony that the thyroid gland disorder is not tied to the memory and thinking problems known as "mild cognitive impairment". Some old evidence has suggested that changes in the body's endocrine system, including thyroid function, might be linked to Alzheimer's sickness and other forms of dementia, said researchers led by Dr Ajay Parsaik, of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.

Mild cognitive impairment, in particular, is tenderness to be an antiquated warning sign of the memory-robbing disorder Alzheimer's disease, the lessons authors said in a university news release. In conducting the study, Parsaik's span examined a group of more than 1900 people, including those with mild and more severe cases of hypothyroidism. The participants, who were from the same Minnesota county, were between 70 and 89 years of age.

Effects Of Concussions In Football Players

Effects Of Concussions In Football Players.
The US National Institutes of Health is teaming up with the National Football League on study into the long-term gear of repeated fore-part injuries and improving concussion diagnosis. The projects will be supported largely through a $30 million award made last year to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health by the NFL, which is wrestling with the conclusion of concussions and their impact on current and former players. There's growing involve about the potential long-term effects of repeated concussions, particularly among those most at risk, including football players and other athletes and members of the military.

Current tests can't reliably diagnosis concussion. And there's no course to forebode which patients will recover quickly, suffer long-term symptoms or arise a progressive brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), according to an NIH pressure statement released Monday, Dec 2013. "We need to be able to predict which patterns of offence are rapidly reversible and which are not.

This program will help researchers get closer to answering some of the important questions about concussion for our schoolchild who play sports and their parents," Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), said in the dirt release. Two of the projects will be told $6 million each and will focus on determining the extent of long-term changes that occur in the brain years after a top injury or after numerous concussions. They will involve researchers from NINDS, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and scholastic medical centers.

Another Genetic Cause Of Alzheimer's Disease

Another Genetic Cause Of Alzheimer's Disease.
Researchers have discovered that the deviant of a gene associated with betimes onset Alzheimer's may block a key recycling process essential for brain cell survival - a finding that points the way to possible treatment for the disease. When it's working properly, this gene - called presenilin 1 (PS1) - performs a decisive house-cleaning aid by helping brain cells digest unwanted, damaged and potentially toxic proteins.

But in its mutated form, the gene fails to assistant cells recycle these latent toxins, suggesting an explanation for the damage to the brain characteristic of Alzheimer's disease. "We maintain we have identified the principal mechanism by which mutations of PS1 cause the most common genetic blank of Alzheimer's disease," study co-author Dr Ralph A Nixon, professor in the departments of psychiatry and room biology as well as director of NYU's Center of Excellence on Brain Aging and the Silberstein Alzheimer's Institute, said in a university news programme release.

And "Presently, no effective treatment exists to either leaden or prevent the progression of Alzheimer's disease," added Nixon, also director of the Center for Dementia Research at the Nathan S Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in New York City. "This recognition has the implied of identifying such a treatment".

Scientists Are Researching The Causes Of The Inability To Read

Scientists Are Researching The Causes Of The Inability To Read.
Glitches in the connections between unchanging imagination areas may be at the root of the common learning hubbub dyslexia, a new study suggests. It's estimated that up to 15 percent of the US inhabitants has dyslexia, which impairs people's ability to read. While it has long been considered a brain-based disorder, scientists have not accepted exactly what the issue is.

The new findings, reported in the Dec 6, 2013 stream of Science, suggest the blame lies in faulty connections between the brain's storage gap for speech sounds and the brain regions that process language. The results were surprising, said foremost researcher Bart Boets, because his team expected to find a different problem. For more than 40 years many scientists have planning that dyslexia involves defects in the brain's "phonetic representations" - which refers to how the principal sounds of your native language are categorized in the brain.

But using sensitive perception imaging techniques, Boets and colleagues found that was not the case in 23 dyslexic adults they studied. The phonetic representations in their brains were just as "intact" as those of 22 adults with general reading skills. Instead, it seemed that in public with dyslexia, language-processing areas of the brain had difficulty accessing those phonetic representations. "A suited metaphor might be the comparison with a computer network," said Boets, of the Leuven Autism Research Consortium in Belgium.

And "We show that the dope - the data - on the server itself is intact, but the link to access this information is too slow or degraded". And what does that all mean? It's too soon to tell, said Boets. First of all this meditate on used one form of brain imaging to study a small class of adult university students. But dyslexia normally begins in childhood.

Scientists Are Exploring The Human Cerebral Cortex

Scientists Are Exploring The Human Cerebral Cortex.
Higher levels of self-professed sacred trust appear to be reflected in increased thickness of a key brain area, a renewed study finds. Researchers at Columbia University in New York City found that the outer layer of the brain, known as the cortex, is thicker in some areas surrounded by people who place a lot of significance on religion. The reflect on involved 103 adults between the ages of 18 and 54 who were the children and grandchildren of both depressed exploration participants and those who were not depressed.

A team led by Lisa Miller analyzed how often the participants went to church and the unalterable of importance they placed on religion. This assessment was made twice over the ambit of five years. Using MRI technology, the cortical thickness of the participants' brains was also even once.

Walking About Two Kilometers A Day Can Help Slow The Progression Of Cognitive Disorders

Walking About Two Kilometers A Day Can Help Slow The Progression Of Cognitive Disorders.
New check in suggests that walking about five miles a week may assistance tortoise-like the progression of cognitive illness among seniors already affliction from mild forms of cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease. In fact, even healthy community who do not as yet show any signs of cognitive decline may help stave off brain illness by engaging in a similar uniform of physical activity, the study team noted. An estimated 2,4 million to 5,1 million mobile vulgus in the United States are estimated to have Alzheimer's disease, which causes a devastating, permanent decline in memory and reasoning, according to National Institute on Aging.

The researchers were slated to present the findings Monday in Chicago at the annual congregation of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). "Because a dry for Alzheimer's is not yet a reality, we hope to find ways of alleviating disease progression or symptoms in ancestors who are already cognitively impaired," lead author Cyrus Raji, of the department of radiology at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a RSNA intelligence release. "We found that walking five miles per week protects the acumen structure over 10 years in people with Alzheimer's and MCI, especially in areas of the brain's clue memory and learning centers. We also found that these people had a slower decline in retention loss over five years".

To assess the impact that physical exercise might have on Alzheimer's progression (as well as that of less unembellished brain illnesses), the researchers analyzed data from an ongoing 20-year study that gauged weekly walking patterns centre of 426 adults. Among the participants, 127 were diagnosed as cognitively impaired - 83 with tranquil cognitive impairment (MCI), and 44 with Alzheimer's. About half of all cases of MCI time progress to Alzheimer's. The rest were deemed cognitively healthy, with an overall run-of-the-mill age of between 78 and 81.

A decade into the study, all the patients had 3-D MRI scans to assess discernment volume. In addition, the team administered a examination called the mini-mental state exam (MMSE) to pinpoint cognitive decline over a five-year period.

After accounting for age, gender, body-fat composition, chair size and education, Raji and his colleagues predetermined that the more an individual engaged in physical activity, the larger his or her brain volume. Greater planner volume is a sign of a lower degree of brain cell death as well as general brain health. In addition, walking about five miles a week appeared to foster against further cognitive abstain from (while maintaining brain volume) among those participants already suffering from some form of cognitive impairment.

People At High Risk Of Alcoholism Also Have More Chances To Suffer From Obesity

People At High Risk Of Alcoholism Also Have More Chances To Suffer From Obesity.
People at higher hazard for alcoholism might also kisser higher difference of becoming obese, new study findings show. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis analyzed observations from two large US alcoholism surveys conducted in 1991-1992 and 2001-2002. According to the results of the more late-model survey, women with a one's nearest and dearest history of alcoholism were 49 percent more likely to be obese than other women. Men with a genre history of alcoholism were also more likely to be obese, but this association was not as strong in men as in women, said victory author Richard A Grucza, an assistant professor of psychiatry.

One explanation for the increased danger of obesity among people with a family history of alcoholism could be that some people substitute one addiction for another. For example, after a child sees a close relative with a drinking problem, they may avoid demon rum but consume high-calorie foods that stimulate the same reward centers in the brain that react to alcohol, Grucza suggested.

In their scrutiny of the data from both surveys, the researchers found that the link between family history of alcoholism and bulk has grown stronger over time. This may be due to the increasing availability of foods that interact with the same brain areas as alcohol.

What Similarities And Differences Between Sleep, Amnesia And Coma

What Similarities And Differences Between Sleep, Amnesia And Coma.
Doctors can get the idea more about anesthesia, have a zizz and coma by paying attention to what the three have in common, a original report suggests. "This is an effort to try to create a common discussion across the fields," said comment co-author Dr Emery N Brown, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "There is a relation between sleep and anesthesia: could this help us understand ways to produce supplemental sleeping medications? If we understand how people come out of anesthesia, can it help us help people come out of comas?" The researchers, who compared the corporeal signs and brain patterns of those under anesthesia and those who were asleep, make public their findings in the Dec 30, 2010 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

They acknowledged that anesthesia, siesta and coma are very different states in many ways and, in fact, only the deepest stages of nap resemble the lightest stages of anesthesia. And people choose to sleep, for example, but failing into comas involuntarily. But, as Brown puts it, general anesthesia is "a reversible drug-induced coma," even though physicians pick to tell patients that they're "going to sleep".

So "They believe 'sleep' because they don't want to scare patients by using the word 'coma,'" Brown said. But even anesthesiologists use the administration without understanding that it's not quite accurate. "On one level, we truthfully don't have it clear in our minds from a neurological standpoint what we're doing".

Alzheimer's Disease Is Associated With A High Blood Pressure

Alzheimer's Disease Is Associated With A High Blood Pressure.
People distress from cardiovascular infirmity who have lower-than-normal blood pressure may face a higher gamble of brain atrophy - the death of brain cells or connections between brain cells, Dutch researchers account June 2013. Such brain atrophy can lead to Alzheimer's infection or dementia in these patients. In contrast, similar patients with high blood pressure can uninteresting brain atrophy by lowering their blood pressure, the researchers added.

Blood pressure is measured using two readings. The choicest number, called systolic pressure, gauges the pressure of blood in motion through arteries. The bottom number, called diastolic pressure, measures the pressure in the arteries between heartbeats. Normal blood persuade for adults is less than 120/80, according to the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

For the study, 70 to 90 was considered orthodox diastolic blood pressure, while under 70 was considered low. "Our observations might suggest that patients with cardiovascular disease represent a subgroup within the catholic population in whom low diastolic blood pressure might be harmful," said researcher Dr Majon Muller, an epidemiologist and geriatrician at VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam.

On the other hand, lowering blood demand in clan with high blood pressure might slow brain atrophy. "Our findings could connote that blood pressure lowering is beneficial in patients with higher blood squeezing levels, but one should be cautious with further blood pressure lowering in patients who already have low diastolic blood pressure".