Learn About Brain Atrophy!
Brain atrophy is a condition characterized by a decrease in the size of brain cells and tissues. What you should know about brain atrophy is that its symptoms include muscle weakness, vision impairment, speech impairment, dementia and other neurological disorders. Based on this fact, brain atrophy somehow resembles the symptoms of cerebral palsy. Even more importantly, the brain atrophy symptoms are not specific for this condition and can appear in many other disorders, such as brain tumors or other neurological diseases. Many diseases that cause brain atrophy are associated with dementia, seizures and a group of language disorders called the aphasias. Dementia is characterized by a progressive impairment of memory, which is severe enough to interfere with social and working skills. Memory orientation, abstraction, ability to learn and higher executive functions such as planning, organizing and sequencing might also be impaired.
There are many causes of brain atrophy, causes which include malnutrition, stroke, abnormal cell or hormonal change, brain tumors and postoperative brain atrophy. Other conditions that present brain atrophy as a sign in the clinical picture are Angelman syndrome, cockayne syndrome, moyamoya syndrome and schinzel gledion syndrome. Besides the above, there are other diseases that can cause brain atrophy and that mainly regard traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, Pick’s disease, senile dementia, front-temporal dementia and vascular dementia, brain palsy (in which the damaged areas may impair motor coordination), Huntington’s disease and other gene-linked, hereditary diseases that cause build-up toxic levels of proteins in neurons, which actually lead in the end to brain damage and brain atrophy. Besides these, there are numerous less common causes for brain atrophy, starting from krabbe disease (which destroys the myelin sheet that protects axons), Kearns-sayre syndrome (which interferes with the basic functions of neurons), infections diseases such as encephalitis, neurosyphilis and AIDS (in which an infectious agent or the inflammatory reaction produces brain lesions and brain atrophy). Due to the fact that there are many causes of brain atrophy, the treatment relates to the initial cause - the etiological treatment helped by the symptomatic treatment that includes vitamins such as B1, B6 and other nerotrophic drugs. Because there are so many causes of brain atrophy, diagnosing it can be very difficult, such as in the case of cerebral palsy. Generally, the symptoms and the clinical features of the patient related to other clinical tests, including the neuroimaging techniques, point to a certain diagnose and treatment, just like in the case of cerebral palsy therapy. Among the various causes of brain atrophy, there is encephalitis - this is caused by an infectious agent and in this case, the diagnose is pointed out by the symptoms that the patient has or had some time ago, such as high fever. Also, the diagnose can be easily established, in case the brain atrophy occurs secondary to a traumatic brain injury. The degenerative nerve diseases that cause cerebral atrophy can also cause the worsening of many of the body's activities, including balance, movement, talking, breathing and heart function – therefore, this problem becomes a medical emergency and the treatment is necessary in order to maintain the patient alive. Many of these diseases are genetic, which means they run in families or they imply a genetic mutation. Many experimental studies are being performed in order to improve the treatment for these patients – some of these studies are focused on surgical stem cell implants, which help the patients regain the tissue that was damaged and improve their neurological functions. Also, there is hope that gene therapy can help the prognosis of the patients diagnosed with genetic mutations and even cure them. |
