Protect your brain from colds
Infectious inflammation spoils memory
Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaIt is known that Alzheimer's disease can occur due to inflammation, so it would not be an exaggeration to say that it impairs memory.
However, as Neil A. Harrison from the Medical School of Brighton and Sussex (UK) found out, inflammation can worsen memory without Alzheimer's disease – simply by interfering with glucose metabolism in the brain memory center.
Neil Harrison and his colleagues injected several volunteers with serum against typhoid fever to provoke an inflammatory reaction in the immune system, and simultaneously monitored the absorption of glucose by the brain using positron emission tomography. At the same time, the participants of the experiment had to perform a series of virtual tests on spatial memory.
In the final article published in the journal Biological Psychiatry (Harrison et al., Peripheral Inflammation Acutely Impairs Human Spatial Memory via Actions on Medial Temporal Lobe Glucose Metabolism, the authors report that inflammation was accompanied by a weakening of glucose metabolism in the median temporal lobe of the cortex, which is considered one of the memory centers. At the same time, the person performed a spatial memory test worse than the one who was injected not with a vaccine, but with a saline solution, and who did not have any inflammation.
From this, the researchers concluded that memory loss and inflammation in this case are related, and they are connected through glucose metabolism.
Generally speaking, there is a lot of clinical data about this connection: doctors have long noticed that severe infections impair memory and cognitive functions in general, especially in the elderly. It is not necessary that the infection directly affects the brain, it can be a banal flu, but inflammation makes itself felt in a variety of organs, and in the brain its metabolic consequences can affect higher mental functions. In younger people, such disorders can quickly disappear, but for those who are older, infection together with inflammation can trigger some kind of dementia.
The authors hope to learn more about the relationship of inflammation with age-related cognitive-mental disorders, and at the same time to understand whether it is possible, by maintaining immunity in a calm state, to delay the development of such diseases.
Prepared based on the materials of Medical Xpress: Infections damage our ability to form spatial memories.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru28.01.2014