Neurology Medicine

Posts Tagged ‘Aging Brain’

The researchers based their study on healthy brain aging because they believe that knowledge in this field can be useful for the development of future tools for diagnosis of dementia, a disorder that involves progressive loss of cognitive functions, because to damage or brain disorders beyond those attributable to normal aging. On the other hand, one of the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease is the appearance of personality changes in people who have it. Some research has found, in fact, in the early stages of this disease, people tend to become more neurotic and less scrupulous.

According to the researchers, is therefore crucial to know the relationship between personality and state of the brain during aging in healthy people, to establish what happens in the brains of people with certain diseases and also to generate early diagnosis.

Scientists explain that many previous investigations of non-human animals have shown that chronic stress is linked to certain adverse effects on the brain. From these investigations, Head and his colleagues established the hypothesis on which they based their study: negative traits of human personality could also affect our brain, in particular during the aging process.

Thus, they assumed that neurosis, a mental disorder with no evidence of organ damage characterized by a high level of anxiety and the onset of repetitive behaviors to try to reduce stress levels, should be damaging to structural brain volume. The investigation focused on the middle temporal and prefrontal regions of the brain because it is these which produce the greatest changes during aging, and also because they are the brain areas that sit in certain cognitive abilities such as attention, emotions and memory.

According to statements by one of the authors of the research, psychologist Denise Head, appeared in a statement from Washington University, the results are a first step toward understanding how personality can affect brain aging. Head argues that these data clearly demonstrate a relationship between personality and brain volume, particularly in brain regions associated with social information processing and emotions.

Also, the researcher adds that the results suggest that personality influences the degree of aging of the human brain and also the way the brain aging may affect the personality of each individual. The researchers plan to conduct future studies to monitor the structural changes that will suffer the brain of the participants in this research, in order to deepen this process and its links to personality.

A team of psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, has discovered a relationship between the personality of older people and the state of the brain in old age. According to the scientists in an article published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, in general, during aging, there is a reduction in the volumes of certain brain regions, particularly in the middle temporal and prefrontal areas. However, these reductions or changes do not occur equally in all people, because, according to the results, neuroanatomical integrity can be modified to a lesser or greater extent depending on certain individual personality traits. Read the rest of this entry »