PET

Study: Moderate lifetime drinking may lead to lower Alzheimer-related beta amyloid deposits in the brain

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Mod­er­ate drink­ing tied to low­er lev­els of Alzheimer’s brain pro­tein (Busi­ness Standard):

“Kore­an researchers stud­ied 414 men and women, aver­age age 71, who were free of demen­tia or alco­hol-relat­ed dis­or­ders. All under­went phys­i­cal exams, tests of men­tal acu­ity, and positron emis­sion tomog­ra­phy (PET) and mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (MRI) scans. They were care­ful­ly inter­viewed about their drink­ing habits.

The study, in PLOS Med­i­cine, mea­sured drink­ing in “stan­dard drinks” — 12 ounces of beer, five ounces of wine, or one-and-a-half ounces of hard liquor. Com­pared with abstain­ers, those who drank one to 13 stan­dard drinks a week had a 66 per cent low­er rate of beta amy­loid deposits in their brains. [Read more…] about Study: Mod­er­ate life­time drink­ing may lead to low­er Alzheimer-relat­ed beta amy­loid deposits in the brain

Understanding Brain Imaging

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Daniel Lende and Greg Downey run the though-pro­vok­ing Neu­roan­thro­pol­o­gy blog. Daniel also teach­es a class at Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame, and he asked his stu­dents to sub­mit group-based blog posts in lieu of the tra­di­tion­al final essays. He explains more on Why A Final Essay When We Can Do This?.

Below you have a spec­tac­u­lar post writ­ten by 4 of his stu­dents. They show how brain imag­ing is start­ing to pro­vide a win­dow into the plas­tic­i­ty (glos­sary here) of our brains, and how our very own actions impact them. For good and for bad.

Under­stand­ing Brain Imaging

— By Chris Dud­ley, Matt Gasperetti, Mikey Nar­vaez, and Sarah Walorski

Do you remem­ber the anti-drug pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment from the 1980s that showed an egg fry­ing in a hot pan which rep­re­sent­ed your brain on drugs?

[Read more…] about Under­stand­ing Brain Imaging

Nutritional Supplements and Brain Fitness

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Well, the idea that you can just pop a pill to improve your mem­o­ry and atten­tion lost some ground today.

The Asso­ci­at­ed Press released an arti­cle on DHEA, a steroid pre­cur­sor to testos­terone and estro­gen used to improve ath­let­ic per­for­mance, increase sex dri­ve, and reduce fat as well as fight dia­betes and heart dis­ease. The con­clu­sion of a two-year study at the Mayo Clin­ic in Min­neso­ta and Uni­ver­si­ty of Pad­ua in Italy was that it did not improve strength, phys­i­cal per­for­mance, or oth­er mea­sures of health. The pos­i­tive news was: [Read more…] about Nutri­tion­al Sup­ple­ments and Brain Fitness