Excerpt:
There is always the possibility that the meds are responsible. One long-term study found lithium users (one-third who had a university degree) to be in the low average range on functions of attention and memory. Nevertheless, the authors believe that while medication may cause some degree of cognitive slowing, our pills are not the main culprit.
Bearden
et al's review of what could be wrong with the brain reads like a
neurologist's laundry list from hell: ventricular enlargements, cortical
atrophy, cerebellar vermal atrophy, white matter hypertensities
(especially in the frontal cortex and basal ganglia structures), greater
left temporal lobe volume, increased amygdala volume, enlarged right
hippocampal volume, hypoplasmia of the medial temporal lobe, and more.
Then there's the matter of those chemical imbalances, such as glucose
metabolism and phospholipid metabolism.Say all that in rap time and you have the sound of our brains breaking down, no longer capable of processing information the way it is supposed to. It is possible that these studies did not adequately account for the normal aging process, as Dr Bearden was ready to acknowledge to this writer, but she also added that it is "likely that there is an interaction between the disease process and normal aging processes, such that people affected with bipolar illness are somehow more vulnerable to the effects of aging."
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