Although we initially tend to pay attention to obvious features such as hair, it has been long established that familiar faces are recognized better from their inner (eyes, nose, mouth) rather than their outer (hair, hairline, jaw, ears) parts1. Studies have shown that this advantage of inner features does not occur in children until they’re around 10—11 years old. Children younger than this tend to use outer features to recognize people they know2.
Latest Research News
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.
Analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the cerebrospinal fluid has found that both symptomatic Alzheimer’s patients and asymptomatic patients at risk of Alzheimer’s showed a significant decrease in levels of circulating cell-free mtDNA in the CSF. Patients with frontotemporal dementia did not display this.
A large meta-analysis has concluded that having diabetes increases the chance that a person with mild cognitive impairment will progress to dementia by 65%.
There was no consistent evidence that hypertension or cholesterol levels increased the risk of someone with MCI progressing to dementia. Smoking was similarly not associated with increased risk, although the reason for this probably lies in mortality: smokers tend to die before developing dementia.
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.