Neuro Newsflashes™ Newsletter (March 2020)

Exercise is good for your brain’s gray matter

If you needed more motivation to get moving in the new year, a new study provides more evidence that exercise can help keep your brain healthy and functional, and possibly keep dementia and Alzheimer’s at bay.

In a new study out of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, researchers found that people who actively took part in cardiorespiratory exercise — like walking, running, hiking or biking — showed improved brain health, particularly when it came to brain volume and grey matter.

Untangling the Alzheimer's-Sleep Connection

Researchers inch closer to learning how sleep and Alzheimer's pathology are linked.
Two studies in January explored how sleep might be associated with Alzheimer's tau pathology. The first, led by Brendan Lucey, MD, and David Holtzman, MD, both of Washington University in St. Louis, found that older adults who had less slow-wave sleep had higher levels of brain tau.

The findings, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggested that poor quality sleep in late life may signal deteriorating brain health.

Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep

Sleep is an important part of your daily routine—you spend about one-third of your time doing it. Quality sleep – and getting enough of it at the right times -- is as essential to survival as food and water. Without sleep you can’t form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories, and it’s harder to concentrate and respond quickly.

How to create a sleep routine that will help you sleep better

Adopt good sleep habits, get good sleep. Melatonin, CBD, weighted blankets… you've tried it all but nothing is helping you get the shut-eye you need to take on the day like well-rested superhero. But forget sleep tech and supplements. There's one thing you might not have tried yet: Designing your perfect bedtime routine. 

Easily Distracted? This Could Be Why.

Distractions are everywhere. It might be a conversation happening in the background, your phone vibrating with your 20th email of the day, the tag on the back of your shirt, or simply a thought that pops into your head. It can happen at any time and there is seemingly little you can do about it.

No matter the source of the distraction, the effect is the same. Your mind wanders until you eventually (hopefully) return back to the task at hand a little frustrated with yourself. And then the cycle repeats. But what if you could break the cycle? What if you knew what was happening in your brain and you could do something to stop it?

Study finds dopamine, biological clock link to snacking, overeating and obesity

Findings define a connection between reward, dopamine, and circadian pathways in the overeating.

The study demonstrate that the pleasure center of the brain that produces the chemical dopamine, and the brain’s separate biological clock that regulates daily physiological rhythms, are linked, and that high-calorie foods – which bring pleasure – disrupt normal feeding schedules, resulting in over-consumption.