Out of the many different types of vegetables, green leafy vegetables appear to be most effective in protecting the brain from memory loss as we get older. At least according to a new study out of Rush University Medical center in Chicago and published in the journal Neurology.

The study’s author Martha Morris points to the high vitamin E content in vegetables as a possible explanation for the beneficial effect, but I doubt it. More likely are the multitude of phytochemicals.

Nonetheless, the magnitude of the effect is impressive. According to Morris,

Compared to people who consumed less than one serving of vegetables a day, people who ate at least 2.8 servings of vegetables a day saw their rate of cognitive change slow by roughly 40 percent

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A new study that tracked 2500 Australian children for 16 years found that babies breastfed for less than six months had a 61% increased risk of mental health problems at 8 years of age than those children breastfed for longer.

The study was done by a team at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth.

Earlier this month, researchers out of the University of Edinburgh claimed their findings show breast milk does not boost IQ. However, this goes against mounds of previous research indicating breast milk does in fact boost brain power.

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Yet another study (presented at the American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting) has come out showing that estrogen does not improve working memory or executive function in postmenopausal women.

The study does show, however, that premenopausal women who’ve had their ovaries removed may benefit from estrogen replacement therapy when it comes to working memory.

Premenopausal women who are having their estrogen production suppressed (GnRH agonist therapy) also appear to have deficits in working memory function.

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This week, my wife and I both have had colds. Whereas she’s had a lot of congestion, I’ve had a nagging cough. While going through 10 bags of Kleenexes one thing I began to wonder yesterday was: Do people who get frequent respiratory infections (”colds”) have poorer lung function later on in life? In other words, is there a direct relationship between the number of colds you get over the course of your life and the functional level of your lungs once you reach old age?

If there’s a pulmonologist reading, please feel free to answer- but my bet was yes.

Coincidently, a very interesting study out of the Mayo clinic appeared in the news today discussing this phenomenon as it relates to the brain! From physorg.com:

Central nervous system infections such as the common cold could be linked to memory loss late in life.

The study basically suggests that each viral infection/cold you get leads to a little bit of damage to the hippocampus. The hippocampus, of course, is the memory engine of your brain. Over the course of a lifetime, the more colds you get, the more likely you’ll be to accumulate significant and noticeable damage to the hippocampus.

The authors of the study (published in Neurobiology of Disease) note:

We hypothesize that mild memory and cognitive impairments of unknown etiology may, in fact, be due to accumulative loss of hippocampus function caused by repeated infection with common and widespread neurovirulent picornaviruses

One also has to wonder: What about teenagers and young adults? Is a portion of their memory ability determined by how many (and how severe) colds they had as children?

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Students who study for many hours on end should take note of a new study done by David Foster and other researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The study supports the idea that taking regular breaks can improve learning and memory formation.

Foster and his colleagues at MIT looked at rats exploring unfamiliar areas. When the rats were given breaks, their brains started to quickly replay the recently learned information. Many believe this is the brain’s way of preparing and processing the memory so that it can be placed in the long term stores.

The concept, known formally as consolidation, has been illustrated by several other research studies done over the past few years.

“Perhaps we don’t take breaks seriously enough,” Foster says. “Perhaps we’re wrong to expect all learning to occur on the job. Perhaps an important part of learning in general, and in jobs and at school, is occurring during breaks.” (From sciencentral news)

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One of the hormones that control appetite is leptin. Released by fat cells, it normally crosses into the brain and tells it to stop eating.

In many obese people, however, leptin is unable to cross into the brain, as it has trouble penetrating the blood-brain barrier.

Now a new study reveals that not only does leptin regulate appetite, but it also has an important role in keeping learning and memory sharp.

The new findings about leptin, published in the journal Peptides, may be part of the reason obese patients may also have problems with their memory.

As you can see from some of my earlier posts, there is a strong correlation between the amount of food consumed and brain power.

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Came across this Flash animated brain buster of a puzzle called ‘Escape from the Crimson Room’.

It’s appears to be a very simple brain teaser in that there’s not much in the way of directions. You basically find yourself in a small red room and have to figure a way out.

Played for about 5 minutes and seemed kind of fun; going to give it a try later when there’s more time…

Here’s the link: http://www.fasco-csc.com/works/crimson/crimson_e.php

I’m curious to hear how difficult it is to solve…

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Back in July, I posted about using nothing other than pure thought to control and interact with the material world via brain-computer interfaces.

Now a team of neurologists and neurosurgeons at Washington University School of Medicine have enabled a 14 year old to play the Atari 2600 game Space Invaders using nothing more than his thoughts.

The brain-computer interface used in this case is a grid of electrodes placed directly over the brain’s surface.

Apparently, the boy was able to control and play the game almost instantaneously.

(fast forward to the 2nd half of the video below , and you will see a boy playing without any hand movements)

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At Smartkit we are always working on ideas to bring more interactivity to our users. It could be via widgets, social games or who knows. The sky’s the limit right?

With that in mind, where do you hang out online the most? Are you addicted to Facebook or do you find something like iGoogle a bit nicer? Submit your vote below.

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If you can’t choose one, you can vote twice. It’s ok, we’ll let you.

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A natural chemical (flavonoid) found in strawberries has recently been shown to boost long-term memory formation in mice.

The chemical is called Fisetin, and works by boosting a process called long-term potentiation, or LTP. LTP is felt to be very important in helping the brain convert a short term memory into a long term one.Interestingly, fisetin has also been found to protect brain cells from damage and degeneration.

“The good news is that fisetin is readily available in strawberries but the bad news is that because of its natural product status there may be little financial interest in getting it into human clinical trials for diseases associated with memory loss such as Alzheimer’s, where the treatment options are currently very limited,” says Pamela Maher of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

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Just read how in the UK, drugs like Aricpet, Exelon, and Reminyl are no longer available as treatment for mild cases of Alzheimer’s disease.

They are felt to offer too little benefit compared to their expense.

I believe this offers a taste of things to come in the US, as healthcare funds become more and more scarce.

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Most forms of dementia are not very treatable or reversible. For example, there is not much you can really do for patients with Alzheimer’s disease or multi-infarct dementia when it comes to reversing the memory loss and cognitive decline.

Normal Pressure Hydrocephalous and Celiac disease, however, are two fairly common reversible dementias frequently misdiagnosed and overlooked.

Celiac disease affects about 1 in 133 people (reference: webmd). About 10% of these patients will develop nervous system involvement. Previously, not much has been published linking celiac disease to memory decline and dementia, so most neurologists and primary care doctors will have never made the connection. Recently, however, new research from the Mayo Clinic has come out describing many such cases. Patients affected were as young as 45 and as old as 79.

Importantly, celiac disease is quite easy to treat. The disease is thought to result from an abnormal immune response to gluten, which is found in products containing wheat, barley and rye. This abnormal immune response is thought to attack and degrade the brain. So the treatment is to merely cut these types of food out of your diet. In those neurological patients affected, the dementia tends to clear quite rapidly.

If you or a family member is developing brain decline, make sure your neurologist or primary care doctor has considered celiac disease as a potential diagnosis.

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In a fairly remarkable study, progesterone given shortly after traumatic brain injury (TBI) appears to cut the risk of death by 50%. This is important because currently there is no good treatment that improves the outcome of TBI.

Furthermore, those patients given the progesterone had significantly less disability.
The treatment, importantly, was found to be safe, as no adverse side effects occurred.

The study, lead by Dr. David Wright out of Emory University, was published in the October 2006 issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

A larger trial of 1000 patients is planned to try to confirm the benefits and safety.

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Traditional Persian medicine holds that saffron is useful in treating depression. Came across a study published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology that shows saffron extract twice a day to be as effective as Prozac in treating mild to moderate depression. Subjects were feeling better in as little as six weeks. Side effects were minimal, and another study showed them to be no different than placebo.

Saffron is probably not hte cheapest brain food, with one pound costing up to $5000. Apparently, 75,000 flowers need to be harvested to make this amount.

Interestingly, other studies have shown saffron extract improves learning and memory in animal studies.

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“It is now possible to read someone’s mind by remotely measuring their brain activity with brain MRI scans, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves.” (From Newscientist.com)

In a breakthrough research study, volunteers were shown one of several test objects, and based on MRI brain scanning data alone, researchers were able to tell what object the volunteers had seen. The research, conducted by Frank Tong out of Princeton University and Yukiyasu Kamitani out of ATR Computational Neurosciences Laboratories in Kyoto Japan, was published in Nature Neuroscience in 2005.

More recently, MRI brain scans are also proving themselves to be superior to the polygraph when it comes to lie detection. Two MRI lie detection companies are getting ready to launch:

• No Lie MRI, Inc in San Diego, California
• Cephos Corp.in Massachusetts

Furthermore, there is wide speculation that the government is already using this technology as an interrogation method.

The best information of the brain we can get today is taken with MRI machines featuring a large magnet combined with one radio-frequency detector.

The next generation of MRI machines, however, will use arrays of anywhere from 8 to 256 radio-frequency detectors, with even more powerful magnets.

It’s not hard to see how the era of mind reading made easy is just around the corner.

What would you want to ask your significant other? Your teenage kids? Your friends?

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