Because long-term cognitive decline can occur in some older adults after undergoing surgery, there has been some concern that exposure to anesthesia may be associated with increased dementia risk. It is therefore pleasing to report that data from the very large, long-running Mayo Clinic Study, the Rochester Epidemiology Project, has found that receiving general anesthesia for procedures after age 45 is not a risk factor for developing dementia.
Latest Research News
A recent study reveals that when we focus on searching for something, regions across the brain are pulled into the search. The study sheds light on how attention works.
In the experiments, brain activity was recorded as participants searched for people or vehicles in movie clips. Computational models showed how each of the roughly 50,000 locations near the cortex responded to each of the 935 categories of objects and actions seen in the movie clips.
Late-life depression is associated with an increased risk for all-cause dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and, most predominantly, vascular dementia, a new study shows.
A new meta-analysis extends previous research showing a link between depression and Alzheimer’s disease to late-life depression and dementia. The analysis of 23 studies concluded that those with late-life depression were significantly more likely to develop dementia (1.85 times more likely), and that the risk of developing vascular dementia was significantly greater than that of developing Alzheimer’s (2.52 vs 1.65).
A recent report from Autistica estimates that nearly a quarter (24%) of children with autism are non-verbal or minimally verbal — problems that can persist into adulthood.
A review of over 200 published papers and more than 60 different intervention studies has now concluded that:
While it’s well-established that chronic stress has all sorts of harmful effects, including on memory and cognition, the judgment on brief bouts of acute stress has been more equivocal. There is a certain amount of evidence that brief amounts of stress can be stimulating rather than harmful, and perhaps even necessary if we are to reach our full potential.
A humanoid robot has been designed, and shows promise, for teaching joint attention to children with ASD. Robots are particularly appealing to children, and even more so to those with ASD.
http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/interactive-robot-trains-kids-with-autism/
As many of you will know, I like nature-improves-mind stories. A new twist comes from a small Scottish study, in which participants were fitted up with a mobile EEG monitor that enabled their brainwaves to be recorded as they walked for 25 minutes through one of three different urban settings: an urban shopping street, a path through green space, or a street in a busy commercial district.
A study involving 67 college football players has found that a protein biomarker for traumatic brain injury (S100B) was present in varying degrees in the blood samples of all the players after every game, even though none of them suffered a concussion. This demonstrates that even the most routine hits have some impact on the blood-brain barrier and possibly the brain itself.
A new finding points to brain reorganization, rather than brain size, as the driver in primate brain evolution. Data from 17 anthropoid primate species (including humans) across 40 million years has found that around three quarters of differences between the brains of species of monkeys and apes are due to internal reorganization that is independent of size. The prefrontal cortex in particular appears to have played the biggest role in explaining the evolutionary changes in primate brains.
http://phys.org/news/2013-03-organisation-trumps-size-primate-brain.html
A study involving nearly 6,000 African American older adults has found those with a specific gene variant have almost double the risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease compared with African Americans who lack the variant. The size of the effect is comparable to that of the ‘Alzheimer’s gene’, APOE-e4.
The gene (ABCA7) is involved in the production of cholesterol and lipids. It also affects the transport of several important proteins, including amyloid precursor protein, which is involved in the production of amyloid-beta.