Keeping your brain running - Part 2
In the last part I showed you the 2 basic factors that affect our brain health : Diet and exercise. In this part I will discuss about the other 2 factors : The health and the lifestyle. I will show you what must be done to maintain your brain healthy, and how common things in our health can affect our brain health.
Health - diseases and preventions
Generally, when we talk about health and lifestyle we think about the things we do every day. In the previous part of this article, I showed an example : eating tuna without knowing what positive effects it gives. The brain health is influenced by the general body health. Movement for the body helps the brain. The brain controls the body, it's like the motherboard of your body, it controls everything. Muscles, vision, sound, lips, everything. Normally if one of those gets broken the brain can handle it, it's not a big problem, however there are diseases which I'd like to discuss. As you age, your brain, your muscles, your body do too. That's why I made this article in the first place, to show you how to keep your brain sharp. Bellow is a list of diseases, with a description, a cure and a prevention method.
Alzheimer's disease
DESCRIPTION - Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a common aging disease which destroys brain cells and ulterior leads to death. It's characterised by the strong aging of the brain, and usually appears on patients over 65 years old. It's a degenerative disease, and it's terminal. This disease is one of the worst things that can happen to you, and you need to know nobody is safe from it. It is said 1 out of 85 people will be affected by Alzheimer's disease by the year of 2055. I wrote this article to make sure this terrible disease doesn't happen to any of you, because you must never think "Oh, only 26 million people with AD, I'm very safe and that can't happen to me". No, that's a bad psychology. You must allways be prepared, no matter what. Symptoms appear as the disease advances and it includes confusion, irritability and aggression, mood swings, long (And short, at some cases) memory loss and a general loss of senses. AD can go on for years in a person's life without being noticed. The diagnosis is usually made after a series of cognitive tests and a brain scan. One of the most famous people to have had Alzheimer's Disease is the 40th US president Ronald W. Reagan, who was diagnosed with AD at the age of 83. He was known for forgetting his speeches, for having mood swings and having a strong loss of long therm memory. Ironically, Reagan died of a pneumonia at 93.
CURE/S - Unfortunately, AD is incurable. Once you are diagnosed with Alzheimer's, hope is lost. That's why prevention is essential. The problem is AD is also degenerative. Being both incurable and degenerative, patient management is more than essential. Once you are diagnosed with AD, you'll have to keep the disease under control in order to live at your maximum capacity. If you have Alzheimer's, you can only keep the disease under control by keeping your brain sharp. See part 1 first. If you know any cases of AD in your family, remember that the disease is degenerative, which means you have a much higher chance to get AD when you grow old. Bellow are ways to prevent it
PREVENTION - Alzheimer's is a terminal disease. Like cancer and diabetes, it will kill you eventually. Prevention of AD is not hard, therefore you should use the prevention methods, especially if you are above 55 years old. If you are young, then you shouldn't worry about it untill you grow older.
The most obvious form of prevention in the case of AD is brain exercise. Intelectual activities such as playing chess, or human socializing. I strongly urge you to watch part 1 of this article if you haven't already, it will tell you everything about keeping your brain sharp. If you are a smoker or a drug addict, you should know that those activities have a very negative effect on your brain, and will increase the chance of AD, so giving up on those activities will obviously decrease the chance.
Parkinson disease
DESCRIPTION - Parkinson Disease (PD) is a generative disorder of the nervous system. It results in the death of certain brain cells which have specific functions assigned to them, but the death cause of the cells is unknown. The symptoms are usually a difficulty in movement, shaking, and dementia settling in advanced forms of the disease. PD normally is only encountered to people aged above 50 years old. The cause of PD is not known, however we assume it is passed on through generations. People with PD have a very slow and difficult walk cycle, because the cells that help them do things we call normal are dead. They also present certain shaking of the body. It would be mentionable that people with PD have a hard time writing, their hands shaking causes a very awkward writing.
CURE/S - Most recent studies tell that isradipine is useful for restoring dopamine cells (The ones that get killed by Parkinson's disease) however besides this, there is no cure for it. PD, just like AD, is fatal, and will kill the subject after a certain time.
PREVENTION - The cause of Parkison Disease is not known, therefore we can't actually talk about prevention. PD is supposed to be a genetic disease, therefore prevention is not likely.
Huntington's disease
DESCRIPTION - Huntington's disease (HD) is a genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and leads to cognitive decline and eventually dementia. Generally it becomes visible in the middle age (About 35-45 years). Symptoms of HD can be different from each subject, but they are generally : Early symptoms are lack of coordination and an unsteady gait. As it advances, uncoordinated, jerky body movements become more visible, and it leads to dementia.
CURE/S AND PREVENTION - Being a generic disease, there's no way to prevent it, or cure it.
There are more cognitive diseases but the rest are not so common. These 3 diseases are the most common ones. In this post I tried to explain to you readers what each means.
Lifestyle - Pros and cons
In this particular chapter of brain care there's not much to talk about. I'm going through an analysis to show you guys what you're doing good, and what you're doing wrong. Day by day we do unvoluntar things. A good example is tacking your finger. When you listen to music, you sometimes tap your finger. Not many of us know that tapping the finger improves your sense of hearing. You detect the sound more accurately. In fact some of us don't even know how much solving a simple puzzle helps.
Daily walks also help our organism which involuntarily helps our brain. As I mentioned above : Body health is brain health. Proper diet, proper exercise, proper lifestyle, they all contribute to a healthy brain.
Thus said, I'd like to call this an end. I'd like to thank Wikipedia and the Franklin Institute 2004 for documentation. Track me for your every-day quality articles!
