Neuroscience
Getting enough sleep is correlated to brain and heart health and after a stroke that is even more important.
A new survey finds that is when people who need it are least likely to get it.
A cohort of 39,559 people were asked every two years how much sleep they usually get at night on weekdays or workdays. Sleep duration was divided into three categories: short, less than six hours; normal, six to eight hours; and long, eight or more hours of sleep. The group included 1,572 people who had a stroke.
Image: Storyblocks
Normal sleep duration was less common for people who had a stroke than…
The neurons in our brains are protected by an insulating layer called myelin. In diseases like multiple sclerosis, this protective layer is damaged and lost, leading to death of neurons and gradual disability.
A recent study in The Federation of European Biochemical Societies Journal examined the importance of the complement component 1, q subcomponent-like protein (C1QL1) in promoting replacement of oligodendrocytes, the cells that produce myelin. About 5 percent of all adult brain cells are oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. The new work is only in mice, it is in the exploratory section, but…
Alcohol is the best-marketed carcinogen out there. Cigarettes and obesity only wish they were able to devote the money to positive imaging that alcohol, one of the top three lifestyle killers, receives. Instead, governments devote billions to education and awareness of those two while the only tepid warning about alcohol is not to drive after you roll the dice on cancer.
When it comes to BPA, PFAS, or weedkillers, government epidemiologists say any presence should be considered pathological but say nothing at all about alcohol use despite it being scientifically shown, unlike most…
A recent study in mice suggests the the liver is key in a molecular link that may also cause humans with diabetes to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Unlike type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes is overwhelmingly in obese people so if the findings in mice ever apply to humans the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease in such people could be avoiding it in the first place.
Alzheimer’s is a poorly understood dementia with little meaningful progress this century, while type 2 diabetes has become more common as wealthy countries have so much affordable food even the poorest residents can be fat. In type 2…
An examination of more than 300 sudden, unexpected deaths in young children, which usually occur during sleep, commonly known as SIDS in babies or SUDC in toddlers, including extensive medical record analysis and video evidence donated by families to document the inexplicable deaths of seven toddlers between the ages of 1 and 3 finds they were potentially attributable to seizures.
These seizures lasted less than 60 seconds and occurred within 30 minutes immediately prior to each child’s death, say the study authors.
Up to 3,000 U.S. families lose a baby or young child…
The benefits of fluoridated water are well-established but when nature rather than science is in charge it can be harmful. The dose makes the poison and over 200 million people worldwide are estimated to be exposed to high fluoride levels in their drinking water.
A new study finds that long-term consumption of water with fluoride levels far above, 1000 percent more, established drinking water standards may be linked to cognitive impairments in children.
The study was conducted in rural Ethiopia where farming communities use wells with varying levels of naturally occurring fluoride ranging…
Our five senses are gathering information at all times. One way our brain sorts the abundance of information is by combining information from two or more senses, such as between smells and the smoothness of textures, or pitch, color, and musical dimensions.
It may be why we began to associate higher temperatures with warmer colors, lower sound pitches with less elevated positions, or colors with the flavor of particular foods. A new paper argues that such unconscious 'crossmodal' associations with our sense of smell can even affect our perception of colors.
Lead author Dr Ryan Ward, a senior…
Hank |
Obesity is closing in on smoking and alcohol as the top killer among lifestyle diseases. Over 25 percent of the world is overweight and in countries like the UK and US, that number is approaching 70 percent. It is correlated to things like heart disease.
Is it a genetic issue, and therefore exculpatory? A new paper hopes to show that. The authors analyzed brain scans of 1,351 young adults across a range of
body-mass index (BMI)
scores. They found that the overall volume of the hypothalamus was larger in overweight and obese people. They declared a significant relationship…
In 1998, a neuroscientist, Christof Koch, and a philosopher, David Chalmers, made a bet over whether science would, by 2023, have explained how consciousness comes into being. Twenty-five years on, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in New York City, the two agreed that Chalmers won the consciousness wager.
The Hard Problem
Although consciousness, that feeling of being that one experiences through thought, and the senses, defines what it means to be alive, we are very far from understanding how consciousness comes about. It is a problem…
A new study suggests alcoholism coupled with genetic susceptibility is associated with changes to gene expression indicative of disease progression in the brains of mice that are genetically predisposed to Alzheimer’s. When repeatedly exposed to intoxicating amounts of alcohol, these mice showed signs of cognitive decline approximately two months sooner than they usually would.
'Suggests', 'associated', and mice all place the work over in the exploratory pile but with Alzheimer's Disease, there are few answers and a lot of speculation. Epidemiology does correlate higher alcohol use to…