DR KEVWE'S BLOG

Everyone loves Grey’s Anatomy. I mean, honestly, who could possibly hate anything Shonda Rhimes writes? Importantly, this is the show that has inspired scores of devoted fans to pursue careers as doctors. But not everything in the medical world is quite as glamorous as the show makes it seem. Here are 8 misconceptions about being a doctor that Grey’s has perpetuated:

The hospital = your home.

Researchers have found that alternative enactment techniques -- such as acting -- can improve patients' perspective memory. Academics involved in the study claim the new method is particularly beneficial for people with mild cognitive impairment (which could suggest early stages of Alzheimer's disease) and can provide a cost-effective alternative that can support independent living.

Have you ever been shopping and returned home to find that you have forgotten to buy the very item you went shopping for? Have you known it was going to rain yet left your umbrella at home? Have you gone out and left the television on?

All these instances are examples where prospective memory has failed -- you have not remembered to take the action you had planned. While these examples are comparatively trivial, poor prospective memory can have serious consequences -- forgetting to take medication, or leaving the stove on, for example.

A failing prospective memory can be an early sign of Alzheimer's disease, according to University of Chichester psychologists, and new therapeutic methods are being used to utilise levels of prospective memory as a means to accurately diagnose diseases of cognitive impairment. Such methods can be effective non-invasive alternatives to traditional clinical methods such as the extraction of cerebral spinal fluid.

In research published in the journal "Neuropsychology," a team led by the University of Chichester has studied prospective memory performance of 96 participants including patients with mild cognitive impairment aged 64 to 87 years, healthy older adults aged 62 to 84 years and younger adults aged 18 to 22 years.

The study, which also included members from Radboud University Nijmegen, Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Lisbon, looked at prospective memory performance before the introduction of an enhancement technique and compared it with performance after the enhancement technique. The technique used was encoded enactment, where subjects were encouraged to act through the activity they must remember to do.

All age groups reported improvement in prospective memory, but it was particularly marked in those older subjects with mild cognitive impairment, that is, potentially in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. The study suggests that encouraging people in this category to adopt enactment as a means to enhance prospective memory could result in them leading independent, autonomous lives for longer

Leading the study was Dr Antonina Pereira from the University of Chichester. She said: "Poor prospective memory can range from the vaguely annoying to life threatening, depending on the circumstances. We wanted to confirm two things -- that prospective memory deteriorates with age and that enactment techniques might support those with a poor prospective memory."

She added: "We did indeed find that prospective memory erodes as we get older, and our early findings in this little researched area would suggest that enactment techniques are effective in improving prospective memory. We were heartened to see that there was improvement in our group with mild cognitive impairment. Enactment techniques offer the potential for a cost-effective and widely applicable method that can support independent living. This contributes to an individual's health, well-being and social relationships while reducing the burden of care."

Antonina's tip for overcoming poor prospective memory

"The next time you would like to remember to pick up a pint of milk from the store on your way home, do not wait until you have got home to realise you have forgotten to do it. Instead, recreate the action you would like to remember, pretending that you are actually doing it, in as much vivid detail as possible. This might feel awkward to begin with, but it has been identified as an optimal technique to enhance prospective memory. It can have very long lasting effects and work even for people with cognitive impairment. Acting is the key."

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Chichester. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Ballet couples on contemporary music. How does much affect mood and performance?

It doesn't matter if it's Bach, the Beatles, Brad Paisley or Bruno Mars. Your favorite music likely triggers a similar type of activity in your brain as other people's favorites do in theirs.

That's one of the things Jonathan Burdette, M.D., has found in researching music's effects on the brain.

"Music is primal. It affects all of us, but in very personal, unique ways," said Burdette, a neuroradiologist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "Your interaction with music is different than mine, but it's still powerful.

"Your brain has a reaction when you like or don't like something, including music. We've been able to take some baby steps into seeing that, and 'dislike' looks different than 'like' and much different than 'favorite.'"

To study how music preferences might affect functional brain connectivity -- the interactions among separate areas of the brain -- Burdette and his fellow investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which depicts brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Scans were made of 21 people while they listened to music they said they most liked and disliked from among five genres (classical, country, rap, rock and Chinese opera) and to a song or piece of music they had previously named as their personal favorite.

Those fMRI scans showed a consistent pattern: The listeners' preferences, not the type of music they were listening to, had the greatest impact on brain connectivity -- especially on a brain circuit known to be involved in internally focused thought, empathy and self-awareness. This circuit, called the default mode network, was poorly connected when the participants were listening to the music they disliked, better connected when listening to the music they liked and the most connected when listening to their favorites.

The researchers also found that listening to favorite songs altered the connectivity between auditory brain areas and a region responsible for memory and social emotion consolidation.

"Given that music preferences are uniquely individualized phenomena and that music can vary in acoustic complexity and the presence or absence of lyrics, the consistency of our results was unexpected," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature Scientific Reports (Aug. 28, 2014). "These findings may explain why comparable emotional and mental states can be experienced by people listening to music that differs as widely as Beethoven and Eminem."

Not surprising to Burdette was the extent of the connectivity seen in the participants' brains when they were listening to their favorite tunes.

"There are probably some features in music that make you feel a certain way, but it's your experience with it that is even more important," said Burdette, who also is professor of radiology and vice chairman of research at Wake Forest School of Medicine. "Your associations with certain music involve many different parts of the brain, and they're very strong.

"In some cases, you might not even like the particular song, but you like the memories or feelings that you associate with it."

In other research projects, Burdette and colleagues at the School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro have found that trained music conductors are likely to be better at combining and using auditory and visual clues than people without musical training; that activity in brain areas associated with vision decreases during tasks that involve listening; and that different levels of complexity in music can have different effects on functional brain connectivity.

"I find this type of work fascinating, because I think music is so important," Burdette said. "If science can help get more people to recognize what music does to and for us, great."

Music is just a small part of Burdette's research activities -- his most recently published study, for example, showed that brain volume could be an accurate predictor of success in weight-loss attempts by the elderly -- but it has long been a big of part his life.

Burdette grew up playing viola, piano and guitar. He has been singing since childhood and continues to do so, including in the chorus in productions staged by the Piedmont Opera, of which he has been a board member for more than 10 years. He's also done some conducting. His wife, Shona Simpson, plays piano. Their three teenage daughters -- Fiona, Ellie and Jessie -- perform professionally as the Dan River Girls. His brother, Kevin, is a singer who has appeared as a soloist with the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic and other top-tier opera companies and symphony orchestras.

"Music is my avocation," the physician in the family said. "Radiology is my vocation."

Burdette additionally has deep interest, if not direct involvement, in music's clinical applications.

"Music isn't going to cure anything, but it definitely can play a therapeutic role," he said.

In countries such as Germany, Burdette noted, music therapy is commonly an integral part of the rehabilitation process for people who have had strokes, brain surgery or traumatic brain injuries.

"If you're trying to restore neuroplasticity in the brain, to re-establish some of the connections that were there before the injury, music can be a big help, and I'd like to see it used more widely in this country," he said.

Burdette also is a proponent of programs that help people with Alzheimer's, dementia and other cognitive and physical problems re-connect with the world through music. One such program is Music & Memory, which employs iPods with customized playlists featuring songs popular when the participating individual was under 30 years old.

"You can actually see the power of music," Burdette said. "People who were just sitting there, not engaged in anything, light up when they start hearing music from when they were 25.

"It's fantastic. What else can do that? I can't think of anything other than music."