PET-scans

Brain scans show lower accumulation of tau and amyloid pathology among cognitive “super-agers”

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– Tau (blue) and amy­loid (orange) dis­tri­b­u­tion pat­terns for super-agers, nor­mal-agers and MCI patients, when com­pared to a group of younger, healthy, cog­ni­tive­ly nor­mal, amy­loid-neg­a­tive indi­vid­u­als. Cred­it: Mer­le C. Hoenig.

Super-Agers Show Resis­tance to Tau and Amy­loid Accu­mu­la­tion, Main­tain High Cog­ni­tive Func­tion (Soci­ety of Nuclear Med­i­cine and Mol­e­c­u­lar Imag­ing press release):

Super-agers, or indi­vid­u­als whose cog­ni­tive skills are above the norm even at an advanced age, have been found to have increased resis­tance to tau and amy­loid pro­teins, accord­ing to research pre­sent­ed at the Soci­ety of Nuclear Med­i­cine and Mol­e­c­u­lar Imag­ing (SNMMI) 2020 Annu­al Meet­ing. An analy­sis of positron emis­sion tomog­ra­phy (PET) scans has shown that com­pared to nor­mal-agers and those with mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment, super-agers have a low­er bur­den of tau and amy­loid pathol­o­gy asso­ci­at­ed with neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion, which prob­a­bly allows them to main­tain their cog­ni­tive per­for­mance. An image show­ing the com­par­i­son of tau and amy­loid dis­tri­b­u­tion pat­terns in these dif­fer­ent cog­ni­tive aging tra­jec­to­ries has been select­ed as SNMMI’s 2020 Image of the Year. [Read more…] about Brain scans show low­er accu­mu­la­tion of tau and amy­loid pathol­o­gy among cog­ni­tive “super-agers”

Study: Brain imaging not accurate or sensitive enough (yet) to detect Alzheimer’s disease in primary care settings

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dementia_pet_imagingAccu­ra­cy of demen­tia brain imag­ing must improve (Uni­ver­si­ty of East Anglia release):

“A report pub­lished today in The Lancet Neu­rol­o­gy eval­u­ates for the first time how well dif­fer­ent types of brain imag­ing tests work to detect Alzheimer’s and pre­dict how the dis­ease will progress.

The results show that the accu­ra­cy of brain imag­ing must be improved before it can be rolled out [Read more…] about Study: Brain imag­ing not accu­rate or sen­si­tive enough (yet) to detect Alzheimer’s dis­ease in pri­ma­ry care settings

Looking inside the Brain: is my Brain Fit?

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MRI scanner neuroimaging

Today we have the plea­sure to have Dr. Pas­cale Mich­e­lon, one of our new Expert Con­trib­u­tors, write her first arti­cle here. Enjoy, and please com­ment so we hear your thoughts and engage in a nice conversation.

(Btw, if you notice some sim­i­lar­i­ty between the col­ors in the fMRI scan below and the look & feel of this site…well, the rea­son is that those orange-grey fMRI col­ors were our inspi­ra­tion! the orange col­or denotes the most brain activation).

- Alvaro

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You have prob­a­bly heard about CAT and MRI scans (pro­duced thanks to machines like the one to the top right). So you know that these are tech­niques that doc­tors and sci­en­tists use to look inside the brain.

You have prob­a­bly also heard about brain fit­ness and how impor­tant it is to keep a healthy brain to be pro­tect­ed against age-relat­ed and dis­ease-relat­ed brain damages.

The ques­tion we ask here is the fol­low­ing: Can we use brain scans to eval­u­ate how fit the brain is? Before we try to answer this ques­tion let’s start with the basics and try to under­stand how brain scans work.

Brain imag­ing, also called neu­roimag­ing, allows one to [Read more…] about Look­ing inside the Brain: is my Brain Fit?

Discover the Brain

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Hot off the press!

We just found on the new­stand an amaz­ing spe­cial issue of Dis­cov­er mag­a­zine on The Brain-An Own­er’s Man­u­al (Spring 2007), with fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles on how the mind changes from infan­cy to old age, female vs. male brains (yes, we men have brains too), videogames as brain train­ing (by Steven John­son), an arti­cle titled “24 hours in the life of the brain”, the “most mag­nif­i­cent neu­rons, and much much more.

A bit tech­ni­cal, but not too much for any­one who reads pop­u­lar sci­ence books. It will prob­a­bly become a clas­sic for brain afi­ciona­dos. We can not find any men­tion of it in www.discover.com, so we will keep our eyes open and link to the index and more info as soon as we find some­where to link to…ÂÂ