Alzheimer’s

Male DNA in the Female Brain

 in Brain / Podcasts  tagged Alzheimer's / blood brain barrier / brain / DNA / microchimerism / pregnancy by

*Sorry again for crying baby*

Male DNA In The News

The news reported that scientists had discovered a link between male DNA found in the brain of the women who gave birth to sons.

Microchimerism = DNA fragment of another organism that incorporates into you

This particular microchimerism involves the Y chromosome (because otherwise, you wouldn’t know it was specifically male).

Other documented microchimerism studies have reason to believe they may be beneficial – especially in a process called immuno-surveillance (when the immune system is patrolling around looking for things that don’t belong there).

The blood brain barrier is the last layer of cells between what’s in your blood and your brain cells.  DNA fragments are small and can easily pass through the BBB, especially during pregnancy when membrane permeability (the penetrable-ness) has increased all throughout the body already.

The primary resource written by the scientists that did the study of the female brains states that their findings were pretty much inconclusive – partly due to the small sample size of brains they had available.  And they couldn’t study living people.  They were mostly trying to decide if this male microchimerism had a positive or negative effect on Alzheimer’s risk.  The final conclusion – we dunno.  Another obstacle was that the complete health history of the samples they used was not known.

Other sources have stated hypotheses regarding the number of children a woman has and the risk of early onset Alzheimer’s.

This issue with reporting on studies like these is that Alzheimer’s has so many factors that may increase or decrease risk and science is pretty sure there’s NOT just one thing that will cause or prevent someone from developing this disease.

The only thing they could conclude is that microchimerisms are evolutionarily significant.

Here’s the primary journal article.

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Music Credits:  “Radio Martini” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

On the tip of my brain [Show Notes]

 in Brain / Podcasts  tagged Alzheimer's / attention deficit / dementia / dopamine / Frontal lobe / memories / parkinson's / personality / rewards / schizophrenia / seizures / speech impediments by

Recap

Frontal Lobe

  • Motor cortex – voluntary muscle movements, including the muscles that control speech
  • Language translation
  • Prefrontal cortex – personality, judgment

Dopamine

The main chemical, or neurotransmitter, that functions in the frontal lobe is dopamine.

Reward System and Addiction

  • Dopamine is part of your brain’s reward system.
    • So think about when you get a Facebook notification…. dopamine is released in your brain, and your brain really likes how dopamine makes it feel.  Feels good!  So you’re brain will help you pay more attention to the things that will get you more dopamine (that’s why a 5-second Facebook glance can turn into 30 minutes).  This also means that dopamine is involved in your attention span.
    • Some newer studies are looking at dopamine’s effect on addiction.
    • The problem is that it requires increasing levels of “excitement” for your brain to receive the same level of dopamine as the very first time.  This is why people with devastating addictions end up on a downward spiral of ruin.

Memories

  • Dopamine is also involved in short-term memory, especially in complex or cascading tasks (where you have to remember a thing from Step A to complete Step B) in your prefrontal cortex.
    • Diseases that take away short-term memory:  Dementia (general or Parkinson’s-related), Alzheimers.
    • Dopamine is being studied in how it related to dementia and Alzheimer’s.  It’s effects are already known in Parkinson’s disease.
    • To form memories, your brain has to access the same information over and over again (like a smooth, speedy highway).  A road only traveled once, is not easy to travel again, especially if there’s a long period of time between trips down that road.  So in diseases that involve brain cell death, there becomes less and less routes to take to the same memory.  Thus, the older memories are the last to go because they have the most access routes.

Planing

  • Dopamine is responsible for your planning and motivation mechanisms.  If I make a plan and carry out the plan, the reward of dopamine is the outcome.

A New Discovery

They’ve discovered a genetic component that affects the shape of the dopamine receptors.

scanned-image

These cells in your brain don’t actually touch each other.  The terminals spit out dopamine, and it floats in the space and hopefully comes in contact with the next cell’s dendrites.  The dendrites have dopamine-shaped keyholes, and the dopamine should fit in the keyholes perfectly.  But they have discovered that a genetic component affects the keyhole shapes, and this make be a root cause for schizophrenia and attention deficits.

If you think about it, the classic symptoms of schizophrenia – paranoia, anxiety, hallucinations, split personalities – most things affected in your prefrontal cortex.  So if the dopamine receptors are “broken” in this area of your frontal lobe, you can see how there could be a dysfunction.  And this is produced at the genetic level.  Science is still learning about this…

Stroke

Strokes or brain injury in this area of your brain can affect personality. These parts of your brain don’t grow back! Some issues related to the speech motor area of the brain (Broca’s area).  Stuttering (clinically diagnosed) is a misfire in the motor planning part of speech.  Aphasia (loss of words) – part of you brain knows the word but you can’t seem to get it out of your mouth.  Strokes in this area can cause some strange effects in the loss of words.

Seizures

There is also a type of epilepsy (seizures).  Seizures are a misfire or a short in the electrical signals of the brain.  Seizures in the frontal lobe can possibly affect memory (epilepsy-related amnesia).  Must be diagnosed by a neurologist.

Story Time

Back in the day, there was a guy named Pheneas Gage who worked on the railroad.  An accident involving dynamite and a railroad spike, led to a major head injury and an altered personality!

We rub our forehead when we’re trying to remember something because that’s where our short-term memory is.

#RealTalk

Cynthia doesn’t have that many Facebook friends!

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Music Credits:  “Radio Martini” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/