Interest in an "Explain like I have brain fog" thread?

Yann04 said:
yeah me neither. the way I’ve described it is that 99% of my RAM capacity is gone, but my CPU is generally nearly as good as before I was sick.
(I don’t have the energy to translate this to non-technical terms rn sorry)
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That’s what we’re here for :)

Explain like I’m brain-foggy:
The baseline ability of the brain to carry out cognitive tasks is unchanged (CPU), but there’s way less “storage” to be able to keep track of all the necessary bits of information at once (RAM)
 
Can anyone tell me whether a medication that can cause weight gain then produce a result in a gene highlighting a BMI connection to an illness?

Say a person had schizophrenia and was put on medication and that medication caused weight gain and then the patient had their genes tested which showed a connection between BMI and schizophrenia. Is this something that could happen?
 
AliceLily said:
Can anyone tell me whether a medication that can cause weight gain then produce a result in a gene highlighting a BMI connection to an illness?
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Medications do not affect genes but the apparent link between brain genes and high BMI could, as you imply, be due to people with brain diseases being given drugs that raise BMI. There is then a correlation betwen brain genes and BMI. As an analogy, if you looked at genes that confer risk of loss of taste you might come up with the copper transport gene caeruloplasmin not because there is any relation between taste and copper but because a defective caeruloplasmin gene causes Wilson's disease, for which the treatment is penicillamine, which causes loss of taste.

On the other hand, I suspect that the impact of psychiatric drugs on BMI makes only a very tiny tiny difference to gene correlation. The simpler explanation is that we know that BMI is more or less entirely controlled by part of the brain - the hypothalamus, which produces hunger.
 
I just had a thought about pain and how we experience it transmitted by the nervous system and if we can feel that transmission there must be a way in the future to have a device that is sensitive enough to pick up those transmitting signals. Is this far fetched? I also wonder whether pain releases a chemical that could be picked up in blood but we don't know of that chemical yet. Are these possibilities?

All this for measuring pain levels that are felt.
 
AliceLily said:
if we can feel that transmission there must be a way in the future to have a device that is sensitive enough to pick up those transmitting signals.
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Such a device has been used clinically for a long time - it is a standard part of electrophysiological studies of things like carpal tunnel syndrome to detect these signals with what is often called an 'EMG' (although that term is not strictly right). But you can only detect very strong signals deliberately triggered by electrodes. Individual pain signals run inside nerve fibres with insulating sheaths. You can pick them up using tiny electrodes inserted into individual nerve cells but there are so many nerves that is not of great value.

In laboratory experiments you can study pain signals in detail. For instance, we know that pain signals tend to pass along small nerve fibres and rather slowly.

We also know of some of the chemicals involved, like CGRP. Measuring in blood is probably not very helpful but you can detect CGRP in tissue samples.
 
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