Musicians and people who are bilingual have long been shown to have a better working memory, and a new study makes a start on identifying why this might be so.
The brain imaging study, involving 41 young adults (aged 19-35), who were either monolingual non-musicians, monolingual musicians, or bilingual non-musicians, found that musicians and bilinguals needed fewer brain resources when remembering sounds.
Genetic data from more than 94,000 individuals has revealed five new risk genes for Alzheimer's disease, and confirmed 20 known others. The new genes are: IQCK, ACE, ADAM10, ADAMTS1 and WWOX.
The findings support developing evidence that groups of genes associated with specific biological processes, such as cell trafficking, lipid transport, inflammation and the immune response, are "genetic hubs" that are an important part of the disease process.
A study involving 116 healthy older adults (65-75) has found that higher levels of several key nutrients in the blood were associated with more efficient brain connectivity and better cognitive performance. In fact, the findings suggest that the level of nutrients governs the strength of the association between functional brain network efficiency and cognitive performance.
A study involving 5,907 older adults (average age 68) found that those who ate Mediterranean and MIND-style diets scored significantly better on cognitive tests than those who ate less healthy diets, with adherence to a brain-healthy diet correlating with cognitive benefit in a dose-response way. Those who followed these healthy diets also had lower risk of cognitive impairment in later life.
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.
A mouse study suggests that merely changing meal times could have a significant effect on the levels of triglycerides in the liver. Levels of triglycerides followed a circadian rhythm, with levels peaking about eight hours after sunrise (note that mice are nocturnal). Mice generally eat 20% of their food during the day, and 80% at night. Mice lacking a functional body clock eat constantly during the day. When normal mice were given the same amount of food, but had to eat it only at night, there was a quick and dramatic 50% decrease in overall liver TAG levels.
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.