Medicine
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Brain pathology
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Brain pathology
The typical diseases affecting the brain are: traumatic syndromes that, usually considered under the aspect of concussion, contusion and laceration, include disturbances of consciousness (coma, stupor, confusional state and automatism), cerebral hemorrhages, hyper- or hypotensive endocranial syndromes; circulatory syndromes, mainly caused by atherosclerosis, thromboangiitis obliterans, periarteritis nodosa, vascular anomalies, etc.. The clinical forms are mainly represented by: vagal syncope; hypertensive crises (sudden and transient paralysis, monoplegia, hemianopsia or hemiparesis, etc.. ); apoplexy; acute vascular cerebropathies (bulbar thrombosis with violent vertigo, dysphagia, dysarthria, nausea, ataxia, while consciousness remains intact); vascular cerebropathies with slowly progressive nerve disorders (atherosclerotic muscle rigidity, pseudobulbar palsy, internal carotid artery thrombosis) and, depending on the case, crises of disorientation in time and space, progressive psychic and functional impotence, possible dementia of progressive type.
Phlogistic syndromes include forms of infectious origin and probably allergic type (cerebrospinal fever, benign lymphocytic meningitis, tubercular meningitis, acute anterior poliomyelitis, encephalitis). Degenerative syndromes, mostly congenital, hereditary, rarely sporadic, characterized by a progressive course until the total destruction of the entire area or brain system affected, are: congenital diseases, late childhood and youth diseases (tuberous sclerosis, lobar sclerosis); adult diseases (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis); forms of the involutional period (Pick’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, senile dementia).
Tumor syndromes are manifested by signs of local focal irritation (which may also be missing) and a syndrome of endocranial hypertension, which in many cases appears early and often represents the only symptom of the tumor. With regard, however, to the aging of brain cells until the last years of the twentieth century neuroscientists have argued that the responsibility of cognitive deficits of the elderly was due to a gradual thinning of all brain neurons. Following studies carried out on monkeys, at the University of California, it was found that memory loss in the elderly does not result from the disappearance of cortical neurons, more durable and resistant than assumed, but from the death and, above all, atrophy of neurons in the hippocampus and some subcortical nuclei.
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