The safety of Ritalin has been in the spotlight in recent years. Ritalin is widely used to manage the symptoms of attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADHD). If you or your child use Ritalin, you might like to know that there is a growing body of scientific research showing that there is a small increase…
Cardiac Scar Tissue After Stroke. The consequences of stroke are long-lasting, not just on the brain but also on other parts of your body, including your heart. A new study published in the esteemed journal Cell on 22/07/2024 includes some startling findings. Dr Alba Simats and colleagues found that stroke triggers persistent inflammation in multiple…
How do you boost neuroplasticity after a traumatic brain injury? What can you do to ensure that you make the best recovery possible? Neuroplasticity and the Long Haul Recovery from a traumatic brain injury can be a long and difficult journey. It that may take a number of years, even longer than the two year…
Telomere length predicts lifespan. Now, a new study has shown an association between childhood trauma, shortened telomere length and mental illness such as bipolar mood disorder and schizophrenia. Hmmm… What’s that telling us? DNA Transcription Cell division is essential to life and telomeres are part of that process. Telomeres form protective caps on the end…
A powerful piece of medical dogma is the notion that depression has genetic roots. This is the idea that if your mother suffered from depression, then the chances are that you will too. A closedly associated notion is the “chemical imbalance” in the brain idea. This is the claim that depressed patients do not have…
A recent study showed a high rate of misdiagnosis of dementia when using brief cognitive screening tools. Incredibly, 35.7% of patients were incorrectly classified by at least one of the three screening procedures that were examined. The researchers looked at the well known Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Memory Impairment Screen (MIS) and animal naming…
Wow, this is a remarkable finding… It turns out that pregnant women who are suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS), and who elect to undergo an abortion, have significantly increased risk for relapse and the development of new lesions in their brains. This finding is described in an Italian study of female MS sufferers, published on…
Does Herpes Virus Cause Mood Disorders? Research published in Frontiers in Microbiology shows remarkable links between herpes virus infection and mood disorders. Dr Bhupesh Prusty and his team conducted post-mortem brain biopsies. They investigated bipolar mood disorder (BMD), major depressive disorder (MDD), and schizophrenia. They also included a control group of patients with no history…
Synaptic Update Wow, what a fascinating take on the synapse! Compare these two images of the active zone of a synapse. One (Figure 2 below) is easily recognized as a typical textbook rendition of a synapse, but the other not (Figure 1). The image that looks like hallucinatory spaghetti comes from a relatively recent paper…
If you have one copy of a gene called apoE4, then your chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease are more than doubled. Moreover, if you carry two copies of apoE4, then you have a 12-fold risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Remarkably, some brilliant researchers have found a way to neutralize apoE4, albeit that the research is…
