Acute cognitive deficits after traumatic brain injury predict Alzheimer's disease-like degradation of the human default mode network.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) are prominent neurological conditions whose neural and cognitive commonalities are poorly understood. The extent of TBI-related neurophysiological abnormalities has been hypothesized to reflect AD-like neurodegeneration because TBI can increase vulnerability to AD. However, it remains challenging to prognosticate AD risk partly because the functional relationship between acute posttraumatic sequelae and chronic AD-like degradation remains elusive. Here, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), network theory, and machine learning (ML) are leveraged to study the extent to which geriatric mild TBI (mTBI) can lead to AD-like alteration of resting-state activity in the default mode network (DMN). This network is found to contain modules whose extent of AD-like, posttraumatic degradation can be accurately prognosticated based on the acute cognitive deficits of geriatric mTBI patients with cerebral microbleeds. Aside from establishing a predictive physiological association between geriatric mTBI, cognitive impairment, and AD-like functional degradation, these findings advance the goal of acutely forecasting mTBI patients' chronic deviations from normality along AD-like functional trajectories. The association of geriatric mTBI with AD-like changes in functional brain connectivity as early as ~6 months post-injury carries substantial implications for public health because TBI has relatively high prevalence in the elderly.

Epidemiologic reconnaissance of hypertension in the Bahamas

Preliminary studies suggest that in the indigenous Bahamian population hypertensive cardiovascular disease is a prominent cause of morbidity and mortality; however, coronary heart disease is rarely diagnosed. On the basis of the high linoleic acid content in the adipose tissue of the Bahamian children and adults compared to Americans, the hypothesis is proposed that in Bahamians, dietary sources of linolic acid modify the effect of hypertension as a risk factor predisposing to coronary heart disease (AU)