Doctors Discovered How The Brain Dies

Doctors Discovered How The Brain Dies.
Shrunken structures at bottom the brains of weighed down marijuana users might describe the stereotype of the "pothead," brain researchers report. Northwestern University scientists studying teens who were marijuana smokers or past smokers found that parts of the imagination related to working thought appeared diminished in size - changes that coincided with the teens' on one's uppers performance on memory tasks missouri. "We observed that the shapes of thought structures related to short-term memory seemed to come to naught inward or shrink in people who had a history of regular marijuana use when compared to healthy participants," said study framer Matthew Smith.

He is an assistant research professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago. The shrinking of these structures appeared to be more advanced in men and women who had started using marijuana at a younger age. This suggests that youngsters might be more reachable to drug-related celebration loss, according to the study, which was published in the Dec 16. 2013 emanation of the quarterly Schizophrenia Bulletin.

So "The brains abnormalities we're observing are directly allied to poor short-term memory performance. The more that intellect looks abnormal, the poorer they're doing on memory tests". The typescript is provocative because the participants had not been using marijuana for a couple years, indicating that recall problems might persist even if the person quits smoking the drug, said Dr Frances Levin, chairman of the American Psychiatric Association's Council on Addiction Psychiatry. At the same time, Levin cautioned that the exegesis presents a chicken-or-egg problem.

It's not sparkling whether marijuana use caused the respect problems or kin with reminiscence problems tended to use marijuana. "The big $64000 question is whether these recollection problems predate the marijuana use". The scrutinize focused on nearly 100 participants sorted into four groups: bracing people who never used pot, healthy people who were former excessive pot smokers, people with schizophrenia who never used bank and schizophrenics who were former heavy pot users. Researchers worn MRI scans to study the structure of participants' brains.

New Solutions For The Prevention Of Memory Loss From Multiple Sclerosis

New Solutions For The Prevention Of Memory Loss From Multiple Sclerosis.
Being mentally hyperactive may lend a hand humble memory and learning problems that often appear in people with multiple sclerosis, a new study suggests. It included 44 people, about grow old 45, who'd had MS for an common of 11 years. Even if they had higher levels of thought damage, those with a mentally active lifestyle had better scores on tests of information and memory than those with less intellectually enriching lifestyles maleact.icu. "Many kinsfolk with MS struggle with learning and memory problems," on author James Sumowski, of the Kessler Foundation Research Center in West Orange, NJ, said in an American Academy of Neurology gossip release.

So "This meditate on shows that a mentally potent lifestyle might reduce the harmful effects of acumen damage on learning and memory. Learning and memory ability remained rather good in people with enriching lifestyles, even if they had a lot of planner damage brain atrophy as shown on brain scans ," Sumowski continued. "In contrast, persons with lesser mentally quick lifestyles were more in all probability to suffer learning and memory problems, even at milder levels of capacity damage".

Sumowski said the "findings suggest that enriching activities may body a person's 'cognitive reserve,' which can be thought of as a buffer against disease-related celebration impairment. Differences in cognitive reservation among persons with MS may explain why some persons suffer honour problems early in the disease, while others do not develop memory problems until much later, if at all".

The scrutinize appears in the June 15 discharge of Neurology. In an editorial accompanying the study, Peter Arnett of Penn State University wrote that "more check out is needed before any upon recommendations can be made," but that it seemed unexcessive to encourage people with MS to get involved with mentally challenging activities that might repair their cognitive reserve.

What is Multiple Sclerosis? An unpredictable condition of the central nervous system, multiple sclerosis (MS) can break down from relatively benign to somewhat disabling to devastating, as communication between the intellect and other parts of the body is disrupted. Many investigators put faith MS to be an autoimmune disease - one in which the body, through its safe system, launches a defensive attack against its own tissues. In the situation of MS, it is the nerve-insulating myelin that comes under assault. Such assaults may be linked to an unexplored environmental trigger, dialect mayhap a virus.

Most people experience their first symptoms of MS between the ages of 20 and 40; the monogram symptom of MS is often blurred or deceitful vision, red-green color distortion, or even blindness in one eye. Most MS patients suffer muscle weakness in their extremities and hardship with coordination and balance. These symptoms may be severe enough to ruin walking or even standing. In the worst cases, MS can mould partial or complete paralysis.

Many Women In The First Year After Menopause Deteriorating Memory And Fine Motor Skills

Many Women In The First Year After Menopause Deteriorating Memory And Fine Motor Skills.
Women successful through menopause at times be they are off their conceptual game, forgetting phone numbers and passwords, or struggling to encounter a particular word. It can be frustrating, disconcerting and worrisome, but a poor new study helps to explain the struggle. Researchers found that women in the win year after menopause perform marginally worse on certain mental tests than do those who are approaching their post-reproductive years. "This think over shows, as have others, that there are cognitive bonkers declines that are real, statistically significant and clinically significant," said observe author Miriam Weber, an assistant professor in the department of neurology at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY "These are smarmy declines in performance, so women aren't comely globally impaired and not able to function vigrx box. But you notice it on a daily basis".

The sanctum is published in the current issue of the journal Menopause. According to the researchers, the activity of learning, retaining and applying new bumf is associated with regions of the brain that are rich in estrogen receptors. The lifelike fluctuation of the hormone estrogen during menopause seems to be linked to problems associated with viewpoint and memory. "We found the imbroglio is not related to absolute hormone levels. Estrogen declines in the transition, but before it falls, there are major fluctuations".

Weber explained that it is the variation in estrogen devastate that most likely plays a critical role in creating the homage problems many women experience. As the body readjusts to the changes in hormonal levels later after a woman's period stops, the researchers believe mental challenges diminish. While Weber said it is high-level that women understand that memory issues associated with menopause are most appropriate normal and temporary, the study did not include women whose periods had stopped for longer than one year. Weber added that she plans to pinpoint more inflexibly how long-term honour and thinking problems continue in a future study.

Other research has offered conflicting conclusions about the daft changes associated with menopause, the study authors wrote. The Chicago install of the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN) initially found no reference between what stage of menopause women were in and how they performed on tests of working remembrance or perceptual speed. However, a many SWAN study identified deficits in celebration and processing speed in the late menopausal stage.

Studies of menopause typically circumscribe distinct stages of menopause, although researchers may disagree in where they draw the line between those transitions. The researchers involved with this inquiry said that the variation in findings between studies may be due to different ways of staging menopause.

Concussions May Damage Areas Of The Brain Related To Memory

Concussions May Damage Areas Of The Brain Related To Memory.
Concussions may harm areas of the perceptiveness linked to memory in National Football League players. And that mutilation might linger long after the players withdraw the sport, according to a small study. "We're hoping that our findings are present to further inform the game," Dr Jennifer Coughlin, an subordinate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said in a university item release sodium. "That may effective individuals are able to make more educated decisions about whether they're influenceable to brain injury, advise how helmets are structured or divulge guidelines for the game to better protect players".