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Brain And Neurological Conditions
Neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, and multiple sclerosis can devastate both patients and caregivers. Support from others who share the unique challenges of these diseases can often help.
Alzheimer's Disease
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This progressive disease damages nerve cells in parts of the brain involved in memory, learning, language, and reasoning. In early stages, short-term memory begins to fail. Over time, functions such as long-term memory, language, and judgment decline.
About | Prevention | Symptoms | Tests | Treatment | Managing
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
ADHD is characterized by developmentally inappropriate levels of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity and affects 3 percent to 5 percent of all school-age children in the United States—or at least one child in every classroom
About | Symptoms | Tests | Treatment | Managing
Bipolar Disorder
Bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive disorder, is a brain disorder that causes shifts in mood that differ from the normal ups and downs most people experience. These shifts can be severe and affect a person's energy, motivation, and ability to function, but medicines can help.
About | Symptoms | Tests | Treatment | Managing
Brain Tumor
Most brain tumors in children are primary tumors, meaning they arise in the brain. In adults, most are metastatic or secondary tumors, meaning the cancer has spread to the brain from the breast, lung, or other part of the body. Nearly 1 in 4 people with cancer will get a secondary brain tumor.
Depression
Everyone feels sad at times, inexplicably tearful, or just plain down. But when these feelings persist, affecting the way one eats and sleeps, feels about oneself, and thinks about family, friends, and work or school, they may be symptoms of a clinical illness.
Eating Disorders
Besides anorexia and bulimia, disordered eating behaviors include binge eating; over-exercising; chronic dieting; and the abuse of diet pills, laxatives, enemas, or diuretics. Learn how to recognize and treat them from the experts at Duke Medicine.
Headache
It's the most common reason people skip work and school. Headache pain results when nerves of the blood vessels and head muscles are activated and send pain signals to the brain, though it's not clear why these signals are activated in the first place. Especially in the case of migraines, they tend to run in families.
Memory Loss
Memory loss ranges from age-associated memory impairment, or the normal amount of forgetfulness that is expected with age, to dementias such as Pick's disease that profoundly affect a person's ability to function.
Multiple Sclerosis
There is no cure for MS, which interrupts the signals between brain and body as the fatty substance insulating the nerves deteriorates. But thanks to effective treatments, about half of people with MS are still able to walk unassisted 15 years after they have been diagnosed.
Parkinson's Disease
There is no cure for Parkinson's disease. But a number of medications can ease the characteristic tremor and rigidity, and improve a patient's quality of life. In some patients, surgery to implant a device known as a deep brain stimulator is the treatment of choice when drugs have failed or side effects are intolerable.
Stroke
Medicine has made great strides in diagnosing and treating stroke, in which a blood vessel carrying oxygen and other nutrients to the brain becomes blocked or suddenly bursts. As a result, the death rate has dropped even as the number of strokes has risen.
About | Prevention | Symptoms | Tests | Treatment | Managing
