
How baby brain gets worse as it ages
Baby brain atrophy is often the result of a combination of multiple genetic and environmental factors, and scientists have identified a possible cause of it in the baby’s brain.
The brain is also prone to other problems, such as having a smaller brain than a person of similar age, said Dr. Paul Schlegel, director of the Neurobiology Institute at Stanford University and a member of the research team.
It’s a common misconception that the brain can’t shrink as it gets older, he told CoinDesk.
It can, and it can.
“But I think we know that the older a person gets, the less effective they are at regulating their blood pressure and controlling their glucose levels,” he said.
That’s because the brain is made up of nerve cells that send signals to the rest of the body.
The nerve cells are constantly sending messages to each other.
The messages are the brain’s own, and if one of those messages is damaged, it can cause damage to the entire system.
The damage to these cells can lead to problems with vision, hearing, learning, and memory, Schlegels team said in a paper published this week in the journal Neurobiology of Disease.
In their study, Schleger and his colleagues analyzed a group of brain scans of 14 babies.
They compared the brains of those babies to the brains from people with a similar age.
The brains of the older babies were more damaged than those of the younger ones.
Brain scans of those children were done in 2017 and 2018, which showed that the damage to certain parts of the brain wasn’t as severe as it was in people with similar age and brain size.
These brain scans showed that those brain cells had shrunk as the children got older, as compared to adults, Schlegeels team reported.
The team was able to identify the brain cells that were most affected by brain shrinkage, and they were linked to the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
“The brain has a very delicate structure,” Schleges team wrote in their paper.
“A decrease in the number of nerve fibers and the ability to transport information to and from the brain, which is an important function, is one of the factors that contributes to neuronal loss.”
These findings also showed that brain shrinkages were linked with the development of other neurological disorders, including autism.
“There are many other brain processes that also contribute to brain shrinkment, but in general, we see increased brain shrinkings when there is a loss of a key signaling pathway, like a neurotransmitter or a receptor,” said Dr., Michael Ziemba, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the study’s lead author.
“These results suggest that there may be a link between brain shrinkance and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.”
It’s not clear what causes the brain shrinkers, but they may be related to a lack of certain vitamins, zinc, and vitamin B12, which are important to the brain.
“It may be that there is some sort of deficiency in those nutrients that cause the shrinkage,” Schlegeel said.
Researchers have been studying the brain of animals before, and animal studies show that some of these effects are similar to the effects humans may have on the brain as we age.
Brain shrinkage is common in humans, as well, and is a contributing factor to various conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, which affects movement and thought.
“As the brain gets older it is not able to function optimally and in a healthy way, and as a result, it becomes damaged, and that’s how Alzheimer’s occurs,” said Schlegees team.
But the exact cause of brain shrinkaging is still unknown.
Researchers are still exploring the exact causes of this disorder, and whether it can be prevented or prevented in future generations of people.
What they do know is that it may be possible to reduce the severity of brain atroma, or shrink the size of certain areas of the brains, to allow for better communication between parts of it, Schledgell said.
“One of the challenges is that there are no drugs that have been tested for preventing the onset of Alzheimer and other cognitive impairments,” he added.