Lifeboat Foundation

COSTA MESA, Calif. – Health experts say around half of American adults are overweight or obese. While excessive body weight is linked to a number of serious health conditions, including diabetes and heart disease, a new study reveals it can also reduce blood flow to the brain. Researchers warn this can put overweight individuals at great risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

The study examines brain blood flow in 17,721 adults between 18 and 94. To do this, researchers use a brain imaging technique known as single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).

SPECT is a technique in which doctors inject a radioactive tracer into a patient’s blood and then use a special camera to look at the flow of blood. Participants were then split into five categories: underweight, normal weight, overweight, obese, and morbidly obese — to examine blood flow in each of their brains. The brain scan data reveals lower blood flow across virtually all brain regions as body weight increases.

Some neuroscientists are daring to wield the technologies to probe one powerful group of internal brain states: emotions. Others are applying them to states such as motivation, or existential drives such as thirst. Researchers are even finding signatures of states in their data for which they have no vocabulary.

Neuroscientists are scrutinizing huge piles of data to learn how brains create emotions and other internal states such as aggression and desire.

(Credit: Anne Marthe Widvey/Flickr)

The finding may potentially make it easier to monitor people with sleep disorders, as well as unconscious coma patients or those under anesthesia.

The answer is in their genes—especially those that encode for basic life functions, such as metabolism. Thanks to the lowly C. elegans worm, we’ve uncovered genes and molecular pathways, such as insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) signaling that extends healthy longevity in yeast, flies, and mice (and maybe us). Too nerdy? Those pathways also inspired massive scientific and popular interest in metformin, hormones, intermittent fasting, and even the ketogenic diet. To restate: worms have inspired the search for our own fountain of youth.

Still, that’s just one success story. How relevant, exactly, are those genes for humans? We’re rather a freak of nature. Our aging process extends for years, during which we experience a slew of age-related disorders. Diabetes. Heart disease. Dementia. Surprisingly, many of these don’t ever occur in worms and other animals. Something is obviously amiss.

In this month’s Nature Metabolism, a global team of scientists argued that it’s high time we turn from worm to human. The key to human longevity, they say, lies in the genes of centenarians. These individuals not only live over 100 years, they also rarely suffer from common age-related diseases. That is, they’re healthy up to their last minute. If evolution was a scientist, then centenarians, and the rest of us, are two experimental groups in action.

Brain death can be a tricky concept. Clarity from an international group of doctors may help identify when the brain has stopped working for good.

But have you ever wondered: how well do those maps represent my brain? After all, no two brains are alike. And if we’re ever going to reverse-engineer the brain as a computer simulation—as Europe’s Human Brain Project is trying to do—shouldn’t we ask whose brain they’re hoping to simulate?

Enter a new kind of map: the Julich-Brain, a probabilistic map of human brains that accounts for individual differences using a computational framework. Rather than generating a static PDF of a brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is also dynamic, in that it continuously changes to incorporate more recent brain mapping results. So far, the map has data from over 24,000 thinly sliced sections from 23 postmortem brains covering most years of adulthood at the cellular level. But the atlas can also continuously adapt to progress in mapping technologies to aid brain modeling and simulation, and link to other atlases and alternatives.

In other words, rather than “just another” human brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is its own neuromapping API—one that could unite previous brain-mapping efforts with more modern methods.

Last year information was released concerning rejuvenation of the thymus which resulted in a reversal of the epigenetic clock an average of 2.5 years in a small trial of 9 people costing $10,000 per person. You can get this done too. A company has formed called Intervene Immune which will take on volunteers for the process. It is not funded so you would have to pay out pf pocket though eventually the cost may come down and they can provide financing. You do not have to travel to California to get this done. Cost prohibits me, and I may or may not be eligible as I have IBS though that is not on the exclusion list. I emailed them concerning all this which is how I got the information.

http://interveneimmune.com/

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TRIIMX

Continue reading “Thymus Regeneration, Immunorestoration, and Insulin Mitigation Extension Trial” »

A supersensitive dopamine detector can help in the early diagnosis of several disorders that result in too much or too little dopamine, according to a group led by Penn State and including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and universities in China and Japan.

Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter that can be used to diagnose disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.

“If you can develop a very sensitive, yet simple-to-use and portable, detector that can identify a wide range of dopamine concentration, for instance in sweat, that could help in non-invasive monitoring of an individual’s health,” said Aida Ebrahimi, assistant professor of electrical engineering, Penn State, and a corresponding author on a paper published Aug. 7 in Science Advances.

Just like a nostalgic grandparent flipping through old photo albums, our brains constantly replay memories from past events in our lives as we sleep.

It may seem overly sentimental at first, but our minds aren’t just looking to reminisce and remember the good times. All of that brain activity while dreaming serves to strengthen and preserve existing memories, all while simultaneously finding some room for any new memories we may have made over the previous day.

Those are the main findings from a fascinating new study just released by the University of California, San Diego that investigated neural activity during sleep. The research team at UCSD says that no memory is set in stone within our minds; any memory can be lost, and sleep is when our minds rejuvenate old memories via replay and refine/make room for new memories.