Hello friends and followers of NFBSupport!
Hope the first couple weeks of everyone's year have been going well. We've been hard at work with our internal projects as well as local work. We've been surprisingly busy beyond NFBSupport these last couple weeks, so it's been making things interesting!
Enough about us, on to the news!
Many of us work with older patients, and a new study about antipsychotic medications and Alzheimer's provides us with something to watch out for: The medications increase risk of TBI damage in those with Alzheimer's (https://neurosciencenews.com/antipsychotics-alzheimers-tbi-15498/). It was a fairly extensive study, but they did find a significant increase in risk of head injury (29%) and TBI (22%) in those who are on antipsychotics for alzheimers. The recommendation from the study is to only use antipsychotics for the most severe symptoms, as the increased risk of injury is too great.
Moving on to the gut, another study about inflammation in the gut and how a single bout of food poisoning or other infection produces long lasting effects (https://neurosciencenews.com/ibs-gut-infection-15449/). They discovered (in mouse models with salmonella poisoning) that gut infections cause a die-off of neurons in the gut, resulting in inflammation and the prolonged effects of things like IBS. They have found that once proper intestinal flora is reestablished, the neurons can recover. A good reason to eat healthy and avoid an unhealthy diet after food poisoning.
Wrapping up this newsletter with TBI recovery, a team from the University of Arizona has discovered that blue light exposure during the day can help with mild TBI recovery (https://neurosciencenews.com/blue-light-mtbi-15490/). The team believes they are helping with TBI recovery by improving circadian rhythm alignment which helps with general health. This could be good to note for those of us working with TBI patients who might not be getting the best sleep.
Another short one. Hope the rest of January goes well for everyone!
Till next week
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