Latest Research News

Data from 1,895 fourth and fifth grade children living in El Paso, Texas has found that those who were exposed to high levels of motor vehicle emissions had significantly lower GPAs, even when accounting for other factors known to influence school performance.

The link between air pollution and academic performance may be direct (pollutants damage the brain) or indirect — through illness and absenteeism.

The finding adds to other evidence linking air pollution around schools to children's academic performance.

Unplanned hospitalizations accelerate cognitive decline in older adults

Data from the Rush Memory and Aging Project has found that emergency and urgent hospitalizations are associated with an increased rate of cognitive decline in older adults.

Non-elective hospitalizations were associated with an approximately 60% acceleration in the rate of cognitive decline from before hospitalization. Elective hospitalizations, however, were not associated with acceleration in the rate of decline at all.

Can stronger necks reduce concussion risk & severity?

A review of research on the role that the neck’s strength, size, and posture play in reducing concussion risk has concluded that neck strength, size, and posture may reduce risk by lessening the magnitude of force upon impact. It’s suggested that exercises that increase neck strength and possibly size could substantially reduce risk or severity of injury.

A long-term study of nearly 3,000 older adults (57-85) has found that those who couldn’t identify at least four out of five common odors were more than twice as likely as those with a normal sense of smell to develop dementia within five years.

Of the participants, some 14% could name just three out of five, 5% could identify only two scents, 2% just one, and 1% couldn’t identify a single smell.

A study involving 54 older adults (55-80), who possessed at least one risk factor for a stroke, found that those with white matter damage caused by silent strokes reported poor attentiveness and being distracted more frequently on day-to-day tasks. Despite these complaints, about half of these people scored within the normal range on tests of attention and executive function.

It’s suggested that adults who notice that they frequently lose their train of thought or often become sidetracked may in fact be displaying early symptoms of cerebral small vessel disease.

Data from the long-running Rush Memory and Aging Project, involving 960 participants who completed a food frequency questionnaire from 2004 to 2013, found that those who ate one daily serving of green, leafy vegetables had a slower rate of cognitive decline than people who rarely or never ate them. Those who ate at least one serving of leafy green vegetables showed an equivalent of being 11 years younger cognitively.

A review of research from 1957 to the present has concluded that a whole diet approach, and specifically Mediterranean-style diets, has more evidence for reducing cardiovascular risk than strategies that focus exclusively on reduced dietary fat.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/ehs-ssw020514.php

A new study involving 96 older adults initially free of dementia at the time of enrollment, of whom 12 subsequently developed mild Alzheimer’s, has clarified three fundamental issues about Alzheimer's: where it starts, why it starts there, and how it spreads.

A gene linked to Alzheimer's has been linked to brain changes in childhood. This gene, SORL1, has two connections to Alzheimer’s: it carries the code for the sortilin-like receptor, which is involved in recycling some molecules before they develop into amyloid-beta; it is also involved in lipid metabolism, putting it at the heart of the vascular risk pathway.

This is just a preliminary study presented at a recent conference, so we can't give it too much weight, but the finding is consistent with what we know about working memory, and it is of some usefulness.

The study tested the ability of young-adult native English speakers to store spoken words in short-term memory. The English words were spoken either with a standard American accent or with a pronounced but still intelligible Korean accent. Every now and then, the listeners (all unfamiliar with a Korean accent) would be asked to recall the last three words they had heard.