Posted by utopizen on August 29, 2005, at 19:54:20
In reply to Re: Neurotoxicity is a pretty sketchy term, posted by linkadge on August 28, 2005, at 16:50:15
> "Normally the brain's irreplaceable complement of 30-40 thousand odd dopaminergic cells tends to die off at around 13% per decade in adult life. Their death diminishes the quality and intensity of experience. It also saps what in more ontologically innocent times might have been called one's life-force. Eighty percent loss of dopamine neurons results in Parkinson's disease, often prefigured by depression."
>If neurons were some trust fund, I'd be concerned.
Fortunately, it's not that simple. Your brain has this incredibly capacity to heal. There's hope for me yet.
Depression tends to make people's IQ go plummeting at its worst. I certainly felt like I was "going stupid."
It's not true. Your brain heals. It's incredibly capable to heal.
by the way, not to point out the obvious, but it's not actually possible to "count" or partition how much of your dopamine neurons are living/dead in humans quite yet.
They're still having difficulty finding massive holes in people's brains after they suffer, well, massive brain injuries.
It's not like they can take someone who took coke everyday of their life for 40 years and figure that out from a PET scan.
Like I said, it's a good day for a radiologist to determine where the massive holes are from falling off a cliff.
Everything else is either made up or from rat trials. I'm not sure which is more reliable yet.
poster:utopizen
thread:547372
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050827/msgs/548454.html