What I Learnt This Week 20: Vitamin D and Brain Plasticity, Your Partner and Your Health, The Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis...

This is the 20th week on the series 'What I Learnt This Week.' Really didn't know it's been up-to nine months since my last post on this series. At first, I thought I was supposed to write about the 19th week but then, I remembered I wrote about the Mantis Shrimp and that was when I headed to google to search it out, and there it was, the 19th week was floating right before my eyes.

It's been a while here and I must confess, I've really missed my STEM audience. So, don't mind me as I might be talking too much today.

For those that know nothing about the series; I read science articles all 5 working days of the week, and I write about them here on the steem blockchain. Let's go!

Monday: Vitamin D and the Loss of Brain Plasticity

_{Pixabay CCO}

Apart from the common effects of Vitamin D deficiencies like Osteoporosis, Rickets, Osteomalacia and the likes, vitamin D deficiency in newborn babes can affect the plasticity of their brain later in life.

Should in case you do not know what the plasticity of the brain means or its importance?? ^[1]The plasticity of the brain is what ensures: the growth of the brain throughout life, recovery from an injury and reorganisation which includes the formation of new connections with brain cells. So, can you try to imagine what happens without this plasticity??

^[2] McGrath JJ. and his team had been working on this for at least ten years before the breakthrough surfaced. Over the years, what linked the deficiency of Vitamin D to the plasticity of the brain remained unknown even to them.

^[3] First, they found out that the level of Vitamin D affects a particular type of 'scaffolding' in the brain. This 'scaffolding' which is better referred to as the 'perineuronal nets' was found to have reduced in the hippocampus (a region of the brain associated with memory) with a reduction in the levels of Vitamin D.

^[4] The team nailed this ten years long research by getting two groups of healthy adult mice; one as the control group and the other as the experimental group. They removed the Vitamin D contained in the diets of the experimental group for a long period of time. Although it took about twenty weeks, there was a very significant decline in the functions of their brain. Their ability to remember and learn things had reduced alongside the perineuronal nets in their hippocampus.

This research encourages the early treatment of Vitamin D deficiency in humans most esp. children to help them prevent schizophrenia later in life.

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Tuesday: Your Partner and Your Health

_{The love, the attention you give your partner could help them live longer - Pixabay CCO}

Life is short but it can be shorter if you are alone, or probably in a relationship with a very wrong person. This is maybe believed to be a word of wisdom but it's not, this is scientifically proven. It is generally known that a good partner will help live healthier but a team of scientists from the University of Edinburgh confirmed it in a statement that reads: ^[5]

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Having an attentive partner can significantly improve your long-term health and even life expectancy. University of Edinburgh

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^[6] The feeling of having a good and concerned partner alone makes one happy. For the love they readily receive, the love they are shown and the way their partners help them out with their personal issues generates a sense of relief and security for the affected partners. All these things make them happy, optimistic about the future which in turn causes better health and longer life.

^[7]In a group of a thousand and two-hundred (1,200) couples between ages twenty-five(25) and seventy-four(74) interviewed or assessed by the University over a period of twenty years, there was a forty-two percent likelihood of death by the partner who reported a drop in the care received from their mates by the end of the assessment period.

This invariably means to some extent, we have the power to improve our partner's life span, expectancy, and also determine how long we want to have them around. So, y'all in toxic relationships can contact myself or @lemouth, we'll be sharing nice and caring partners as from tomorrow, lol.

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Wednesday: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

_{The Lou Gehrig's disease - Pixabay CCO}

The picture does not mean this disease is a disease of the spinal cord. In fact, forget I used the picture of a spinal cord. ^[8] The Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is a motor neurone disease characterised by the progressive weakness of the muscles, difficulty in walking, talking, swallowing, and eventual paralysis of muscles and respiratory breakdown. So, this means the disease affects the muscles majorly, and the bones indirectly because later on, affected people might be bed-ridden as a result of their inability to walk.

Ever heard of Stephen Hawking, the renowned English physicist and cosmologist? He was diagnosed with this disease in his early twenties but he went on to defy the odds by living for at least twenty more years after the diagnosis. ^[9]Usually, victims die two-five years after the first symptom.

Over the years, the cause of this disease has remained unknown until a few days ago when scientists at the ^[10] University of Illinois found out that this fatal disease can be triggered even by a single nerve injury in the leg or arms.

^[11] This discovery made it known that athletes and people that engage in rigorous physical activities are at risk of having this non-contagious disease. A nerve injury might lead to muscle weakness in the site of injury which later spreads to other muscles in the body without the exception of muscles responsible for breathing. This is where they say there's a respiratory failure because of the weakness of the respiratory muscle that causes suffocation—death.

^[12]Before the scientists drew their conclusions, they surgically injured a single nerve in a rat with a mutated SOD1 gene and a wild-type rat, both at week ten. After a few weeks, a post-surgery on the injured leg of the mutated SOD1 rat showed weakness, a little recovery and the effect on the second leg while the wild-type rat had almost recovered fully but still with weak muscles.

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Thursday: Blueberries Can Lower Blood Pressure

_{Blueberries - Pixabay CCO}

The High Blood Pressure is the major cause of hypertension because all the occurrences that eventually lead to hypertension, first, increased the Blood Pressures and heart rates of the victims. ^[13] Hypertension, if not properly managed, reduces or interrupts the supply of blood to the brain in a condition popularly known as stroke.

Now, getting to know that you can prevent all these just by eating blueberries is fascinating. This is something that has always given people much concern. The stress of knowing you have to keep your blood pressure levels low to avoid hypertension could be threatening and for this same reason,^[14] you might not be able to eat your favourite delicacies because the doctor told you to avoid them.

^[15] The continuous consumption of at least two-hundred grams of blueberries daily for a month is enough to lower blood pressure levels and help you say goodbye to the risks of hypertension.

From the study of forty people, ^[16] the scientists were able to find out that blueberries drink have the ability to lower blood pressure due to the presence of anthocyanins. Although the effects of the anthocyanins are verified on the blood pressure levels, it is ideal to eat the whole fruit other than looking for a way of getting them out of the fruits. There's even a possibility that the effects of the anthocyanins are boosted even by another component of the berries. Who knows? At least, not yet.

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Friday: The Universal Flu Vaccine

_{Flu - Pixabay CCO}

Flu, Influenza, the disease that gives you a^[17] runny nose, cough, muscle fatigue, sneezing, high fever, headache, tiredness, sore throat maybe with a few cases of diarrhoea is about to be fixed as 'scientists just found a way to produce a universal vaccine.'

Usually, the different strains of Influenza require a different treatment and/or vaccine with the inclusion of a yearly update to the vaccines. We might be seeing the end of that as scientists have found an immune cell that can be used as the universal vaccine for this infectious disease, the Killer T cells.

Our conventional vaccines ^[18] induce antibodies to combat the variable HA head of the flu which is the reason for the yearly update. The stem of the flu remains the same which means if we tried to attack from there we might not have to always update our vaccination yearly.

^[19] In addition, the scientists noticed the Killer T cells were about to latch onto the epitopes of all three strains of Influenza. It was more like a dream come true to the Universal Influenza Vaccine Research team. They didn't see any need to use the Killer T cells to combat the flu until they noticed the involvement of the Killer T cells fighting against flu in a mass spectrometric analysis in the Purcell Laboratory

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Enjoy till we meet again...

Thanks for coming!!

That little boy,

@pearlumie

_{Gif created by @rocking-dave}

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References:-

^[12] Nerve Injury May Trigger Onset, Progression of ALS Symptoms, Rat Study Suggests

^[13] Barbro B. Johansson Laboratory for Experimental Neurology, Wallenberg Neuroscience Center, University Hospital, S‐221 85 Lund, Sweden.

^[14] Foods to avoid when you have a high blood pressure

^[15] The ‘blue’ in blueberries can help lower blood pressure

^[16] Ana Rodriguez-Mateos, Geoffrey Istas... Circulating anthocyanin metabolites mediate vascular benefits of blueberries... The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 2019; DOI

^[17] Influenza

^[18] Universal Influenza Vaccine Research

^[19,20] Human CD8+ T cell cross-reactivity across influenza A, B and C viruses