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An impaired movement of the brain's cerebrospinal fluid, which helps remove waste, could explain how poor sleep and heart conditions can increase one's risk of dementia, according to a study. Other functions of the cerebrospinal fluid include cushioning the central nervous system from shocks and delivering nutrients. The colourless fluid is part of the glymphatic system. Researchers led by those at the UK's University of Cambridge said the glymphatic system is considered important for protecting one against varied common forms of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease in which proteins called amyloid clump up and form toxic 'plaques'. Dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder in which memory, speech and thought processes are steadily affected with age, and can eventually disrupt daily activities. The study, published in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, looked at whether a disorder of the brain's small blood vessels -- which affects .
The mother of a nine-year-old girl who died after contracting the so-called "brain-eating amoeba" says she is still struggling to comprehend the loss. "I cannot believe my daughter is gone," a sobbing mother said, adding that there was no clear information from health authorities on how the child became infected. The girl, hailing from Kozhikode, is among those who have succumbed in recent months to Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis, a rare but almost always fatal brain infection caused by Naegleria fowleri. Kerala has been grappling with a rare but deadly disease that has claimed the lives of 19 people in recent months. The culprit is a microscopic parasite known as Naegleria fowleri, more commonly called the "brain-eating amoeba", which causes a condition known as Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis, or PAM. The infection is almost always fatal, killing more than 98 per cent of those who contract it. Over 70 cases have been reported in the state this year. The amoeba is found
A study has found that damage to the prefrontal cortex in the brain that helps with self-control and reasoning could intensify one's political feelings, while damage to brain structure 'amygdala', which is involved in emotional processing, could bring them down. Conducted on Vietnam War veterans, the study compared people who had very localised brain lesions (abnormal change or injury) with those who did not. Researchers have thus identified for the first time which brain networks regulate political passion. "While most people have not sustained brain injuries akin to those experienced by the veterans in the study, our findings tell us what neural circuits are at play for the population at large," senior author Jordan Grafman, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Northwestern University, US, said. For the study, published in the journal Brain, the researchers analysed the behaviour of 124 male US military veterans with penetrating head trauma and 35 ...
Symptoms of long Covid, including fatigue and brain fog, have been linked to damage to the brainstem or the brain region, which acts as a "critical junction" between consciousness and all that is physically happening in the body, according to a study. The brainstem connects the spinal cord to two main parts of the brain -- cerebrum and cerebellum. Often dubbed as the 'control centre' of involuntary functions, the brainstem regulates basic life-sustaining activities such as breathing, heart rate and sleep, and located at the base of the brain. Symptoms of long Covid have been studied to persist in some patients for up to two years following initial infection. The previous studies have found prolonged inflammation to be one of the main drivers of long Covid. In this study, the researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, UK, looked at high resolution MRI brain scans of 30 patients, who had severe COVID-19 early in the pandemic, and found that the infection caused ...
Changes in the spike protein enhanced the ability of the coronavirus to infect the brain, which could underlie the brain-related symptoms of the disease, including brain fog of long Covid, according to a new study. The spike protein directs the virus, SARS-CoV-2, how to enter human cells before infecting them with COVID-19. The exact causes of long Covid, which persists for months after the initial infection, and its brain-affecting symptoms are still not known and are being widely studied around the world. The study could, therefore, help scientists understand these aspects better and may lead to specific treatments to protect and clear the virus from the brain, according to researchers at Northwestern University, UK, and the University of Illinois-Chicago, US. For the study, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, the researchers infected mice with the coronavirus. As the virus multiplied itself within the host, the researchers compared the spike proteins of the viruses in