Data from 23,572 Americans from the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study has revealed that those who survived a stroke went on to have significantly faster rates of cognitive decline as they aged.
Participants, who were aged 45 years or older, had no history of cognitive impairment at the beginning of the population-based study. Over the next five to seven years, 515 of them (2%) had a stroke.
A couple of studies reported at the recent Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society are intriguing.
In the first study, 180 healthy adults completed questionnaires relating to their mood before being given either a drink of peppermint tea, chamomile tea or hot water. Twenty minutes later, their memory and cognition were tested, followed by another mood questionnaire.
Following previous research showing that having a smaller hippocampus is associated with increased risk of PTSD, a study involving 40 participants with PTSD and 36 trauma-exposed healthy controls has found that those PTSD patients who responded to the treatment had larger hippocampi compared to those who didn’t benefit from the therapy.
The participants were evaluated at baseline and after 10 weeks, during which time the PTSD group had prolonged exposure therapy.
The APOE gene, the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, is known to be involved in cholesterol and lipid metabolism. Now the largest ever genetic study of Alzheimer’s disease, using DNA from more than 1.5 million people, has identified 90 points across the genome that were associated with an increased risk of both cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
Data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), involving 230 cognitively normal individuals and 394 individuals with diagnosed with MCI on the basis of one episodic test, has found that performance on two tests markedly improved the identification of those whose MCI was more serious.
MCI can be a step on the road to Alzheimer's, but it can also be a reversible condition, and it’s obviously helpful to be able to distinguish the two.
Various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer's, involve brain network problems. Brain regions are not coordinating as well as they should; white matter is dysfunctional, impairing communications. It has even been suggested that problems in the default mode network (the "resting state" of the brain) may be the ultimate driver of the pathological characteristics of Alzheimer's, such as amyloid plaques, tau tangles, and brain atrophy. Regardless of the order of events, it does seem that network dysfunction is one of the big problems in dementia.
In a study involving 594 patients with sports-related mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), only 45% had made a clinical recovery (had no more symptoms) after 14 days. The finding challenges current belief that most people with a sports-related mTBI recover within 10 to 14 days
A mouse study has found that introduction of oral bacteria into the bloodstream increased risk factors for atherosclerotic heart disease, including cholesterol and inflammation, suggesting that the same bacteria that cause gum disease also promotes heart disease. The findings are consistent with recent evidence that patients with gum disease are at higher risk for heart disease.
The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
Middle-aged Japanese men living in Japan had lower incidence of coronary artery calcification, a predictor of heart disease, than middle-aged white men living in the United States, after accounting for risk factors such as smoking, cholesterol, alcohol consumption, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Tau protein stabilizes structures that transport supplies from the center of the cell to the extremities, but sometimes some tau is not bound to these microtubules and instead clumps together into neurofibrillary tangles — one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, and also linked to other neurodegenerative disorders. A new study supports the theory that ‘bad’ tau travels to different brain regions via the synapses — that is, it’s secreted with the signals passing between neurons.