Posts tagged brain lesions
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Low-fat diet helps fatigue in people with MS
People with multiple sclerosis who for one year followed a plant-based diet very low in saturated fat had much less MS-related fatigue at the end of that year — and significantly less fatigue than a control group of people with MS who didn’t follow the diet, according to an Oregon Health & Science University study being presented today at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pa.
The study was the first randomized-controlled trial to examine the potential benefits of the low fat diet on the management of MS. The study found no significant differences between the two groups in brain lesions detected on MRI brain scans or on other measures of MS. But while the number of trial participants was relatively small, study leaders believe the significantly improved fatigue symptoms merited further and larger studies of the diet.
"Fatigue can be a debilitating problem for many people living with relapsing-remitting MS," said Vijayshree Yadav, M.D., an associate professor of neurology in the OHSU School of Medicine and clinical medical director of the OHSU Multiple Sclerosis Center. "So this study’s results — showing some notable improvement in fatigue for people who follow this diet — are a hopeful hint of something that could help many people with MS."
The study investigated the effects of following a diet called the McDougall Diet, devised by John McDougall, M.D. The diet is partly based on an MS-fighting diet developed in the 1940s and 1950s by the late Roy Swank, M.D., a former head of the division of neurology at OHSU. The McDougall diet, very low in saturated fat, focuses on eating starches, fruits and vegetables and does not include meat, fish or dairy products.
The study, which began in 2008, looked at the diet’s effect on the most common form of MS, called relapsing-remitting MS. About 85 percent of people with MS have relapsing-remitting MS, characterized by clearly defined attacks of worsening neurological function followed by recovery periods when symptoms improve partially or completely.
The study measured indicators of MS among a group of people who followed the McDougall Diet for 12 months and a control group that did not. The study measured a range of MS indicators and symptoms, including brain lesions on MRI brain scans of study participants, relapse rate, disabilities caused by the disease, body weight and cholesterol levels.
It found no difference between the diet group and the control group in the number of MS-caused brain lesions detected on the MRI scans. It also found no difference between the two groups in relapse rate or level of disability caused by the disease. People who followed the diet did lose significantly more weight than the control group and had significantly lower cholesterol levels. People who followed the diet also had higher scores on a questionnaire that measured their quality of life and overall mood.
The study’s sample size was relatively small. Fifty-three people completed the study, with 27 in the control group and 22 people in the diet group who complied with the diet’s restrictions.
"This study showed the low-fat diet might offer some promising help with the fatigue that often comes with MS," said Dennis Bourdette, M.D., F.A.A.N., chair of OHSU’s Department of Neurology, director of OHSU’s MS Center and a study co-author. "But further study is needed, hopefully with a larger trial where we can more closely look at how the diet might help fatigue and possibly affect other symptoms of MS."
(Source: eurekalert.org)
High-Flying Pilots at Increased Risk of Brain Lesions
A new study suggests that pilots who fly at high altitudes may be at an increased risk for brain lesions. The study is published in the August 20, 2013, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
For the study, 102 U-2 United States Air Force pilots and 91 non-pilots between the ages of 26 and 50 underwent MRI brain scans. The scans measured the amount of white matter hyperintensities, or tiny brain lesions associated with memory decline in other neurological diseases. The groups were matched for age, education and health factors.
“Pilots who fly at altitudes above 18,000 feet are at risk for decompression sickness, a condition where gas or atmospheric pressure reaches lower levels than those within body tissues and forms bubbles,” said study author Stephen McGuire, MD, with the University of Texas in San Antonio, the US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. “The risk for decompression sickness among Air Force pilots has tripled from 2006, probably due to more frequent and longer periods of exposure for pilots. To date however, we have been unable to demonstrate any permanent clinical neurocognitive or memory decline.”
Symptoms affecting the brain that sometimes accompany decompression sickness include slowed thought processes, confusion, unresponsiveness and permanent memory loss.
The study found that pilots had nearly four times the volume and three times the number of brain lesions as non-pilots. The results were the same whether or not the pilots had a history of symptoms of decompression sickness.
The research also found that while the lesions in non-pilots were mainly found in the frontal white matter, as occurs in normal aging, lesions in the pilots were evenly distributed throughout the brain.
“These results may be valuable in assessing risk for occupations that include high-altitude mountain climbing, deep sea diving and high-altitude flying,” McGuire said.
Children With Brain Lesions Able To Use Gestures Important To Language Learning
Children with brain lesions suffered before or around the time of birth are able to use gestures – an important aspect of the language learning process– to convey simple sentences, a Georgia State University researcher has found.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, assistant professor of psychology, and fellow researchers at the University of Chicago, looked at children who suffered lesions to one side of the brain to see whether they used gestures similar to typically developing children. She examined gestures such as pointing to a cookie while saying “eat” to convey the meaning “eat cookie,” several months before expressing such sentences exclusively in speech.
“We do know that children with brain injuries show an amazing amount of plasticity (the ability to change) for language learning if they acquire lesions early in life,” Özçalışkan said. “However, we did not know whether this plasticity was characterized by the same developmental trajectory shown for typically developing children, with gesture leading the way into speech. We looked at the onset of different sentence constructions in children with early brain injuries, and wanted to find out if we could see precursors of different sentence types in gesture.
“For children with brain injuries, we found that this pattern holds, similar to typically developing children,” she said. “Children with unilateral brain injuries produce different kinds of simple sentences several months later than typically developing children. More important, the delays we observe in producing different sentences in speech are preceded by a similar delay in producing the same sentences in gesture-speech combinations.”
Children with brain injuries also had a more difficult time in producing complex sentences across gesture and speech, such as conveying relationships between actions, for example saying “help me do it” while making a painting gesture.
“This in turn was later reflected in a much narrower range of complex sentence types expressed in their speech,” Özçalışkan said. “This suggested to us, in general, that producing sentences across gesture and speech may serve as an embodied sensorimotor experience, that might help children take the next developmental step in producing these sentences in speech.
“And if you bypass the gesture-speech combination stage, that might negatively affect developing a broader representation of complex sentence types in speech.”
The researchers also compared children with smaller brain lesions against children with large lesions, and found more of a delay in producing sentences, both in speech and in gesture-speech combinations, in children with large lesions.
The research has implications for developing interventions to help children with the language learning process, “as it shows that gestures are integral to the process of language learning even when that learning is taking place in an injured brain,” Özçalışkan said.
“When children do different kinds of sentence combinations across gesture and speech, that’s like a signal to the caregiver that ‘I’m ready for this,’” she said. “The caregiver can then provide relevant input to the child, and that could in turn help the child take the next developmental step in producing that sentence entirely in speech.”
After nearly 10 years of follow-up of study participants who experienced migraines and who had brain lesions indentified via magnetic resonance imaging, women with migraines had a higher prevalence and greater increase of deep white matter hyperintensities (brain lesions) than women without migraines, although the number, frequency, and severity of migraines were not associated with lesion progression, according to a study appearing in the November 14 issue of JAMA. Also, increase in deep white matter hyperintensity volume was not significantly associated with poorer cognitive performance at follow-up.
Migraine affects up to 15 percent of the general population. “A previous cross-sectional study showed an association of migraine with a higher prevalence of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-measured ischemic lesions in the brain,” according to background information in the article. White matter hyperintensities are associated with atherosclerotic disease risk factors, increased risk of ischemic stroke, and cognitive decline.