Forget where you left your house keys? or where you put your mobile phone? or where you left your glasses? Sounds familiar? It is for me! This condition maybe caused be a virus. Gosh!
Viruses that can affect your brain range from virus of common cold to polio. They can affect brain and cause steady damage, reported by US researchers from Minnesota.
Their study suggests that virus-induced memory loss can accumulate over the lifetime of a person. Eventually it can lead to clinical cognitive memory deficits. This study has been published in the latest issue of the journal Neurobiology of Disease.
The name of the virus is picornaviruses. They have affected more than 1 billion people around the world each year.
The researchers include viruses that cause polio, colds, and diarrhoea. On average, people contract these illness 2-3 times a year.
How these viruses affect our brain, is that when we contract the illness, the viruses cross into the brain and cause a variety of brain injuries. For example, the polio virus can cause paralysis.
The researchers studied the affect of picornavirus family members on mice, and It showed that the viruses injured parts of the brain responsible for memory. In fact, they infected mice with a virus called Theiler's murine encephalomyelitis virus, which is similar to human poliovirus. Infected mice later had difficulty learning to navigate a maze. Some were barely affected, while others were completely unable to manage.
When the mice were killed and their brains examined, a correlating amount of damage was seen in the hippocampus region, related to learning and memory.
The reserachers also added that one virus particularly likely to cause brain damage is enterovirus 71, which is common in Asia. It can cross over into the brain and cause encephalitis, a brain inflammation that can lead to coma and death.
"We hypothesise that mild memory and cognitive impairments of unknown aetiology may, in fact, be due to accumulative loss of hippocampus function caused by repeated infection with common and widespread neurovirulent picornaviruses."
Meanwhile, other viruses can kill brain cells. They include the herpes virus and HIV.
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For reference
Title: Neurobiology of Disease
URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/
Volume 30, Issue 2, Pages 151-280 (May 2008)
4 comments:
You scared me with this article,my dear. I am very forgetful and always,always i forget something.I asked my husband one time, "did you know where my sunglasses are?" then, he said,"yes,dear,you are wearing it!"Can't you believe i am that forgetful????
hauhaa..member of the same club! it happened to me too, different case tho. i was wearing my contact lens, then put on my glasses. i cant see clearly (blurry) and became paranoid what has happened to my eyes!! not to mention keys, and other things i keep on forgetting. yeah it is quite shocking to learn this finding. and it's true that i often suffer from cold. ouchh..
And here I thought it was banging my head on the wall! :))
hauahaha it sounds quite painful and scary too
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