cognitive decline tagged posts

Marijuana appears to hamper blood flow to the brain, which theoretically could affect your memory and ability to reason, a new study suggests.

Marijuana appears to hamper blood flow to the brain, which theoretically could affect your memory and ability to reason, a new study suggests. Brain scans of nearly 1,000 past and present marijuana users revealed abnormally low blood flow throughout their brains, compared with a smaller control group of 92 people who’d never used pot. “The differences were astonishing,” said Dr. Daniel Amen, a psychiatrist and founder of the U.S.-based Amen Clinics. “Virtually every area of the brain we measured was lower in blood flow and activity in the marijuana smokers than in the healthy group.”

Blood flow was lowest in the hippocampus of marijuana users, which...

Amyloid plaque reduction with aducanumab: example amyloid PET images at baseline and week 54. Axial slice shows anatomical regions in posterior brain putatively related to Alzheimer’s disease pathology

The researchers furthermore demonstrated in an early stage clinical study that, after 1 year of treatment with Aducanumab, cognitive decline could be significantly slowed in antibody-treated patients as opposed to the placebo group. Although the causes of Alzheimer’s disease are still unknown, it is clear that the disease commences with progressive amyloid deposition in the brains of affected persons between 10 to 15 years before the emergence of initial clinical symptoms such as memory loss...

Researchers have devised several lipid-based diets aimed at slowing down progression and relieving symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Credit: Janickova et al, Bentham Science Publishers

Numerous epidemiological studies have revealed profitable effects of dietary intake of especially fish oil on cognitive decline during aging and dementia. One of the invariable pathologies in AD is degeneration of cholinergic synapses in brain cortex and hippocampus. Current pharmacological interventions are limited to a few drugs that alleviate symptoms but do not slow down the underlying disease processes eg inhibitors of cholinesterases, enzymes that degrade the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, or memantine, a modulator of glutamate neurotransmission.

Within the EU-funded project LipiDiDiet (FP7-211696, the...