When I was looking for topics to research for this blog post, I found a study out of UC Davis called “Asthma and Memory Functions in Children,” and I was immediately intrigued, so let's talk about it! The study included 2,062 children with asthma ranging from 9 to 10 years old. Their goal was to test how asthma may or may not affect episodic memory (the long-term storage of memory about past experiences and events and how we felt during those times). Their analysis found that children with asthma scored lower on tasks involving episodic memory than the control sample (children with no asthma). They also created a smaller cohort of 454 children and they followed these children and their development for 2 years. Here, they also found that children with an earlier onset of asthma had a slower development in terms of episodic memory. Asthma is a well-known chronic lung disease that causes inflammation and narrowing of airways, making it difficult to breathe. The children in the smaller cohort (454 children) had earlier development of the lung disease, therefore having chronic inflammation for a longer period of time. Therefore, the prolonged inflammation may have caused neuroinflammatory responses that alter neural processing everywhere in the brain, but especially in the hippocampal region (which is a key region for memory function and storage). This alteration may present itself in the form of cognitive dysfunction. Furthermore, I cannot help but wonder how asthma attacks affect neural functioning, as during these times, there is a lack of oxygen being delivered to the brain. Also, I wonder how this influences the development of things like ADHD. So many questions! This study did not dive into how using inhalers and thereby introducing corticosteroids affect cognitive development with asthma, so it will be interesting to see how this research can be expanded.
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This is such an interesting topic. I am curious to know what makes certain children more prone to asthma in the first place. I am also curious to know, if it is truly the inflammation in the bronchiles that affect neurons or if it is the decrease in oxygen affecting the cells of brain. Therefore if it is frequent periodic times of low oxygen, is what potentially leads to children to having effects in cognitive development.
ReplyDeleteIt was really cool how you connected the use of inhalers and the introduction of corticosteroids and cognitive effects together. I found this article on PubMed that specifically looked at corticosteroids and the brain and it talked about regional shifts of corticosteroid levels in the brain during stressful events (Joëls, 2018). I wonder if these asthma attacks in the children cause specific regional shifts of corticosteroid levels in the brain that in turn effect structures in the brain involved in episodic memory.
ReplyDeleteJoëls, M. (2018). Corticosteroids and the brain. Journal of Endocrinology, 238(3), R121–R130. https://doi.org/10.1530/joe-18-0226