Anna Tommerdahl - corticalmetrics insights (Page 4)

PTSD, inflammation and more..

October 01, 2018

Although it is has been considered difficult to treat (and sometimes diagnose), it appears that one underlying symptom in PTSD is neuroinflammation.

It is estimated that approximately 8% of Americans will develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at some point in their life, but nearly 70% of the same population will experience a traumatic situation. So why do some people develop PTSD while others do not? As is the case with TBI/concussion, ethics prevents controlled studies of the development of PTSD, but there are other ways to tease apart

A sample step by step guide to use your Brain Gauge to monitor your brain health

September 28, 2018

One of the strengths of the Brain Gauge is that, when used correctly, it is able to detect changes in your brain function before those changes are large enough to cause physical symptoms. Early detection is paramount for slowing, halting, or even reversing the progression of any disease, which is why monitoring is so important, especially if you are at increased risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease. Monitoring could (and should) be done by a doctor, but it can also be supplemented with a Brain Gauge (we should note that

Possible relationship between ADHD and early onset Parkinson’s

September 25, 2018

A car can be a very useful tool to get you from Point A to Point B, but if you don’t know how to drive a car, it doesn’t do you much good. Even the most powerful tool isn’t very useful if you don’t know how to use it. Since there’s not a comparable technology to the Brain Gauge on the market today, we understand when people aren’t sure of the best methods for using a Brain Gauge to track their brain health. That’

Factors that influence concussion recovery and brain health: Is there an epidemic?

September 19, 2018

There are a lot of factors to consider when evaluating population brain health, and there is a relationship between speed of concussion recovery and baseline brain health at the population level.

As noted in several previous posts, exercise and keeping an active lifestyle are an important part of maintaining good brain health. And yet, many sports put you at risk for developing a concussion. We hear about football on the news all the time, but athletes in other sports - like soccer, basketball, volleyball, cycling, and even swimming (apparently quite

Going head-to-head with other cognitive scoring systems: case study

September 17, 2018

There are lots of brain assessment tools commonly used for concussion, but they fail to consistently detect alterations in brain health.

The Brain Gauge system was designed to be used for a wide spectrum of neurological disorders and other situations that benefit from assessing brain health. From the beginning, we set out to design a system in which pre-injury “baseline” measures would not be necessary. After all, many clinicians see patients only after that patient has sustained a potentially concussive impact.

Similarly, it's difficult to approximate a patient’s brain

Tracking Recovery from Chronic Pain with a Brain Gauge

September 10, 2018

Moving from peripheral to systemic pain
12 years ago, fresh into my first semester of college, I blew out a disc in my lower back. Long story short, I wasn’t one of the lucky >90% of people who feel better on their own within a week or two. My pain continued to progress to the point of turning into Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome / Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, which included systemic symptoms such as headaches/migraines, brain fog, extreme fatigue and anxiety, in addition to the intense pain and

Are my supplements working?

September 07, 2018

And perhaps more importantly, am I taking the right amount of supplements?

I am fascinated by the number of supplements on the market that claim all kinds of brain health benefits - things like better memory, optimized brain performance, and even reversal of the aging process. While I am not disputing or supporting any of these claims, what really impresses me is how many people take supplements on the blind faith that they will improve or optimize their brain performance. How do we know that supplements are actually helping us?

Are we getting dumber?

August 31, 2018

Or just dumber at how we measure brain health?

There have been several articles lately describing the demise of contemporary brain health relative to how “smart” we were 100-150 years ago. Could our brains be decreasing in functional capacity? Has intelligence gone down over the past several decades? We’ll avoid any politically motivated discussions and think about whether there is any data that supports this. We won't discuss whether there is a degenerative process ongoing in the school systems, but rather focus on the data that has been collected

World Records

August 13, 2018

We’re getting stronger, taller and faster, but are we getting smarter?

Running a four minute mile was supposed to be impossible. Until 1954, most coaches, runners, scientists, and the even world’s top physiologists all declared that humans were physically incapable of a sub 4:00 performance, even given ideal training and race conditions. It was simply too fast.

In 1954 a young medical student named Roger Bannister proved them all wrong. On a windy day in Oxford, England, Bannister ran 1 mile in three minutes and 59.4

Lycopene

August 06, 2018

Many of the neurological conditions that we study here at Cortical Metrics are a result of a common underlying problem—neuroinflammation. Whether you’re dealing with an acute concussion or a full-blown case of Alzheimer’s Disease, you have neuroinflammation. Specifically with Alzheimer’s Disease, the inflammation is what ultimately leads to the development of the characteristic plaques in the brain, and while drug companies spend years and millions of dollars developing drugs that target the plaques, those drugs are entirely ineffective at decreasing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease