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Anatomy Refresher The brain accounts for around 2 percent of body weight but gets as much as twenty percent of blood pumped by the heart. There are about 370 miles of tiny “microvessels” in the brain. Those vessels deliver oxygen and nutrients throughout the brain. Blood Pressure and Brain Health Two recently-released studies reveal the importance of blood pressure management to brain health. More importantly, the researchers discovered the importance of managing blood pressure in one’s forties, or even younger. Dr. Matthew Pase, PhD, and Research Fellow in Neurology at the University of Boston School of Medicine, and Dr. Charles DeCarli, Professor of Neurology at the University of California Davis, presented a paper at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in July. (We’ve mentioned Pase in previous newsletters and posts. He used the highly-regarded Framingham Heart Study to produce the now famous, and famously disconcerting, study on the deleterious affe...

Researchers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences reduced heart failure risk in two weeks. One of the great medical research vehicles is the Framingham Heart Study. Originally created in 1948 to study cardiovascular disease, researchers from Boston University assembled a group of volunteers who were monitored in detail and examined every two years. Researchers have used data from the Framingham Heart Study to create a cardiovascular risk evaluation tool called the Framingham Risk Score (FRS). The FRS is used to assess someone’s chance of developing cardiovascular disease in the next ten years. Risk groups are: low-less than a 10 percent risk; intermediate- 10-20 percent risk; and high-over 20%. Recently, a research team at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi analyzed the effectiveness of a yoga and meditation-based lifestyle to determine if it would result in a lower FRS. Yadav Rashni, PhD and the research team recruited 386 healthy participa...

Use These Two New Research Findings to Build Your Bigger Better Brain in 2018 Best, the benefits come from easy- to- do things. Walking Has Newly-Discovered Brain Benefits If you’ve been following our posts, you certainly know that exercise is your top brain-building activity for 2018. Here’s the latest, and rather interesting, research. A team of researchers from schools of medicine at New Mexico University, Colorado University and the University of Copenhagen studied healthy young adults performing different activities.  They found that walking and running have a unique effect: they create pressure waves beginning in the feet caused by landing on the ground. Those pressure waves propel blood into the brain. That contrasts to other exercises like cycling where there isn’t either the lighter foot pressure of walking or the heavier foot pressure of running. Link to the research here . That 10,000 steps thing seems to have some scientific support (oh and remember that we ...

Your brain has an Executive Function . Executive function is the scientific term for our ability to organize activity, learn from past experiences, make plans, solve problems and work puzzles. Some Science Among the areas in the brain involved in executive function are the medial frontal cortex and the lateral prefrontal cortex . Robert M.G. Reinhart PhD and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston University notes that those two areas control most of the executive function. He calls these areas “ the alarm bell of the brain ”. Reinhart is the Director of the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston University and, among other area of brain research, has been studying ways to employ electrical stimulation to improve performance in learning and self-control. “If you make an error, this brain area fires. If I tell you that you make an error, it also fires. If something surprises you, it fires,” says Reinhart. More Science Kimberly Luu, currently doing graduate s...