brain scans Archives - Amazing Health Advances

MRI Drugs Leave Toxic Heavy Metal Residue in the Brain

The AHA! Team — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 05:49:18 +0000

Lori Alton via NaturalHealth365 – MRIs help doctors see inside your body, but new findings have raised red flags. Medical experts want more research on health risks – especially how these metal-based contrast agents might build up in your body long after the scan. Many MRI procedures involve getting a contrast injection to improve the clarity of the images. The problem is that some patients with multiple MRIs report thinking problems afterward. These symptoms increasingly point to gadolinium, a metal used in contrast agents that may be more dangerous than we thought. New research shows it can stay in your body for years, even with healthy kidneys. What’s particularly concerning is that gadolinium might damage your cells and even your DNA. Scientific studies raise serious brain health concerns A study showed a correlation between intravenous gadolinium-based contrast agents and deposits of gadolinium found in neural tissues. Results were published online in Radiology, with lead author Robert McDonald, MD, PhD, Mayo Clinic, noting that some of the administered doses of contrast agent deposited in neural tissues were surprising. Patients who have undergone routine MRIs, such as Marcie Jacobs, later reported a loss of cognitive abilities. After having memory and other brain function issues following several years of routine MRIs for breast cancer detection, Ms. Jacobs ended up on disability. Also in the journal Radiology, Dr. Emanuel Kanal, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, along with Michael Tweedle at Ohio State University, wrote that current studies “called into question” the “safety of at least some” of the agents. While the two did not call for an end to the use of these agents, they did call for increased caution in using these drugs. Are you being offered these MRI drugs? About a third of all MRIs in America still use gadolinium-based contrast agents, even as questions linger about their long-term safety. The FDA has tightened regulations rather than banning the most problematic agents outright – taking a different approach than European regulators who pulled Omniscan and Magnevist from their markets back in 2018. This safety debate isn’t new. Back in 2007, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first required warnings after research linked certain agents to nephrogenic systemic fibrosis, a serious condition causing tissue hardening, particularly in kidney patients who struggle to clear the metal from their bodies. Despite two FDA reviewers pushing for an outright ban on high-risk agents, the agency opted for stronger warnings instead. By 2010, they recommended against using Omniscan, Magnevist, and Optimark for patients with kidney problems. In 2018, warnings expanded to include gadolinium retention risks even for people with healthy kidneys. These days, doctors typically reach for newer macrocyclic agents, which hold their gadolinium more securely and seem less likely to release it into body tissues. However, the debate continues about whether these regulatory steps go far enough to protect patients. Gadolinium brain deposits spark ongoing safety debate Brain scans after certain contrast-enhanced MRIs show gadolinium sticking around – a discovery that’s raised eyebrows across medicine even without clear proof of harm. The findings haven’t definitively shown these metal deposits cause problems, but they’ve certainly got doctors thinking twice. GE Healthcare insists its research shows no evidence of harm from these brain deposits. Bayer has been working with outside researchers to get to the bottom of things. Both companies have settled their share of lawsuits, including some involving deaths. Back in 2010, Bayer reached a settlement with a California man who claimed Bayer’s product Magnevist gave him nephrogenic systemic fibrosis – a rare but serious condition. The health dangers continue to be a hot topic of debate. Research points in different directions – some studies raise red flags while others find no smoking gun. Doctors now find themselves weighing benefits against possible risks, especially when their patients already have kidney problems. The risk to MRI patients continues Doctors now check kidney function before giving patients contrast agents, but that might not solve the problem. We’re seeing gadolinium deposits showing up even in people with healthy kidneys, sometimes months or years after their MRIs. Researchers are worried about finding these metal traces in brain tissue at much higher levels than anyone thought possible. We don’t know yet how this might affect someone’s brain function or overall health over the long haul. The data simply isn’t there. This puts radiologists in a tough spot. These contrast agents help spot tumors, inflammation, and blood vessel problems that might otherwise go undetected. That’s incredibly valuable – but at what risk? Some hospitals have started switching to newer gadolinium compounds like the macrocyclic agents, which seem to hold onto their gadolinium better than older ones like Omniscan and Magnevist. Others are cutting doses to the bare minimum or skipping contrast altogether when possible. For patients needing multiple MRIs throughout their lives, the risk increases with each scan. Many are now asking for contrast-free procedures or looking for facilities that use the newer, possibly safer agents. Until we know more, the smart move seems to use the least risky contrast agents only when absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, researchers keep studying what happens to these metal deposits in the body over time. One thing’s for sure – we haven’t heard the last word on gadolinium safety. Editor’s note: Find out more about how to keep your kidney health strong, own the Fatty Liver Docu-Class package created by NaturalHealth365 Programs, that includes the Kidney Health Docu-Class. Sources for this article include: NIH.gov FDA.gov FDA.gov Current.com Auntminnie.com Propublica.org To read the original article click here.

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Does Estrogen Protect Against the Risk of Brain Shrinkage?

AHA Publisher — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 08:00:38 +0000

American Academy of Neurology (AAN) via Newswise – MINNEAPOLIS – A new study found that people with higher cumulative estrogen exposure over their lifetime had greater brain volumes and fewer indicators of brain disease on their brain scans in midlife. The research is published in the November 3, 2021, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “We found that a number of ways a woman is exposed to estrogen—not having reached menopause, having more total reproductive years, having a higher number of children, using menopause hormone therapy or hormonal contraceptives—were associated with larger gray matter volumes in midlife,” said author Lisa Mosconi, PhD, of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, N.Y. The study looked at 99 women between the ages of 40 and 65 who did not have dementia. They did have risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer’s, such as family history of the disease or the APOE gene that is linked to a greater risk. Researchers compared them to 29 men, matched for age, with similar risk factors. Then researchers looked at the association of reproductive history with the volume of gray matter in the brain, which is an indicator of brain health, and scores on thinking and memory tests. When looking at people’s brain scans, several events that indicate longer estrogen exposure, like more than 39 reproductive years, a higher number of children and pregnancies, and use of hormone replacement therapy and/or hormone contraceptives, were associated with greater gray matter volume. This appeared mainly in the temporal cortex, frontal cortex, and precuneus, areas of the brain in which Alzheimer’s biomarkers often show up first. The results were the same after adjusting for factors like high blood pressure and smoking. For example, for every year longer that a woman was exposed to estrogen in her life, average gray matter volume in certain areas of the brain increased by an average of 1%. People with total reproductive years of 39 years or longer had gray matter volume an average of 5% larger than people with total reproductive years of less than 39 years. Total reproductive years is the difference between the age at menopause and the age when a woman’s period begins. For each additional child a woman had, gray matter volume in certain areas of the brain increased by an average of 2%. When researchers looked at people’s scores on tests of thinking and memory, they found no association with reproductive history indicators. However, people’s gray matter volume in the temporal regions of the brain was associated with better scores. “Previous research has shown that the midlife decline in estrogen that comes with menopause is a driver of brain aging and Alzheimer’s risk in women,” Mosconi said. “Our results confirm that, but there’s also good news. Other factors related to women’s reproductive history, such as a longer reproductive span and use of hormonal therapy, appear to offset the effects of menopause. While the age at which menopause starts is determined partly by a person’s genetics, lifestyle and environmental factors like smoking, obesity and exercise also play a role, and may modify a woman’s risk of brain aging.” The study does not prove that estrogen reduces dementia risk, it only shows an association between the two. A limitation of the study is that brain scans showing gray matter volume may indicate other types of brain disease, not just the kind related to Alzheimer’s. The study was supported by the National Institutes for Health, National Institute on Aging, the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, Maria Shriver’s Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement, and Harold W. McGraw III and Nancy McGraw, and Carol and Michael Weisman. Learn more about Alzheimer’s disease at BrainandLife.org, home of the American Academy of Neurology’s free patient and caregiver magazine focused on the intersection of neurologic disease and brain health. Follow Brain & Life® on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. When posting to social media channels about this research, we encourage you to use the hashtags #Neurology and #AANscience. The American Academy of Neurology is the world’s largest association of neurologists and neuroscience professionals, with over 36,000 members. The AAN is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, migraine, multiple sclerosis, concussion, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. To read the original article click here.

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Your Brain Shows If You Are Lonely or Not

AHA Publisher — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 07:00:41 +0000

Dartmouth College via EurekAlert – Social connection with others is critical to a person’s mental and physical well-being. How the brain maps relationships with other people in relation to one’s self has long been a mystery. A Dartmouth study finds that the closer you feel to people emotionally, the more similarly you represent them in your brain. In contrast, people who feel social disconnection appear to have a lonelier, neural self-representation. The findings are published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “If we had a stamp of neural activity that reflected your self-representation and one that reflected that of people whom you are close to, for most of us, our stamps of neural activity would look pretty similar. Yet, for lonelier people, the neural activity was really differentiated from that of other people,” explained senior author Meghan L. Meyer, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, and director of the Dartmouth Social Neuroscience Lab. The study was comprised of 50 college students and community members ranging from age 18 to 47. Before going in an fMRI scanner, participants were asked to name and rank five people whom they are closest to and five acquaintances. During the scan, participants were asked to make trait judgements about themselves, the people they are closest to and the acquaintances that they had just named, and five celebrities. Participants were asked to rate how much a trait described a person (such as if the person is friendly) on a scale from 1 to 4 (from not at all to very much). The results showed how the brain seemed to cluster representations of people into three different cliques: 1) oneself, 2) one’s own social network, and 3) well-known people, like celebrities. The closer participants felt to someone, the more similarly their brain represented them throughout the social brain, including in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the region associated with the concept of self. Lonelier people showed less neural similarity between themselves and others in the MPFC, and the demarcations between the three cliques was blurrier in their neural activity. In other words, the lonelier people are, the less similar their brain looks when they think about themselves and others. Meyer added, “It’s almost as if you have a specific constellation of neural activity that is activated when you think about yourself. And when you think about your friends, much of the same constellation is recruited. If you are lonely though, you activate a fairly, different constellation when you think about others than when you think about yourself. It’s as though your brain’s representation of yourself is more disconnected from other people, which is consistent with how lonely people say they feel.” The findings illustrate how loneliness seems to be associated with distortions in the neural mapping of social connections with others. To read the original article click here.

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‘Knowing How’ Is in Your Brain

AHA Publisher — Fri, 29 May 2020 07:00:07 +0000

Carnegie Mellon University via EurekAlert – Although we often think of knowledge as “knowing that” (for example, knowing that Paris is the capital of France), each of us also knows many procedures consisting of knowing how, such as knowing how to tie a knot or start a car. Now a new study has found the brain programs that code the sequence of steps in performing a complex procedure. In a recently published paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to find and decode the procedural information required to tie various knots, with enough precision to identify which knot is being planned or performed. To reach this conclusion, Drs. Robert Mason and Marcel Just first trained a group of participants to tie seven different knots, and then scanned their brains while they imagined tying or actually tied the knots while they were in an MRI scanner. The main findings were that each knot had a distinctive neural signature, so the researchers could tell which knot was being tied from the sequence of brain images collected. Furthermore, the neural signatures were very similar for imagining tying a particular knot and planning to tie it. Dr. Just noted that “Tying a knot is an ancient and frequently performed human action that is the epitome of everyday procedural knowledge, making it an excellent target for investigation.” The research project was funded by the Office of Naval Research. While naval cadets frequently use nautical knots and naval doctors tie knots in surgical procedures, naval personnel are required to master many other types of procedural skills. Understanding how the brain learns and represents procedural tasks is an important part of the science of learning. The machine learning algorithm the researchers used succeeded by first processing the fMRI data from trials in which the participants mentally tied a knot like as a bowline or a sheet bend knot, and learned the association between each of the knots and their respective neural signatures. “Once we identified the neural representations of the procedures of how to tie each specific knot, we were able to predict which knot they were about to tie before they started tying it”, said Dr. Mason. That was possible because we have a plan for tying each knot, a plan that becomes activated just before the actual procedure is executed.” What distinguishes this finding from previous “brain decoding” studies is that knowing how involves a particular sequence of actions over executed over some time period, and not just a static snapshot of knowing that. In 1951, Harvard neurophysiologist Karl Lashley proposed that a complex act like playing a tune on a musical instrument requires than a linkage between the successive steps involved in the procedure; he hypothesized that it requires a higher-order mental structure or plan for organizing the sequence of steps. These new findings now confirm the existence of such higher-order mental representations of procedure, and they furthermore identify which procedure is which. The ability to identify the neural representation of a procedure may useful in developing instructional techniques that teach procedures with high efficiency and in developing brain-computer interfaces that translate a mental procedure into a robotic procedure. To read the original article click here.

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