Huntington’s disease is a genetic brain disorder that usually strikes in midlife. As the disease progresses, patients experience involuntary dance like movements called chorea (Greek word for “dance”), as well as cognitive decline.
The patients will face motor disorder (hyperkinetic and hypokinetic aspects), cognitive impairment, behavioural (non-cognitive) symptoms.
Unlike most other brain dysfunctions, this disorder relates just to one gene: so in this case the experimenters were able to manipulate the genes of mice so that they had the mouse equivalent of Huntington’s Chorea. It was very easy to evaluate the status of the mice’s movement by giving a score on various motor tasks.
A group of scientists (Tara Spires Helen E. Grote, Neelash K. Varshney, Patricia M. Cordery, Anton van Dellen, Colin Blakemore, and Anthony J. Hannan) done studies on mice about this disease.
The mice were accordingly divided into three groups: those that did not have genetic modification, and 2 groups where the gene was deliberately manipulated so that the mice as they aged were destined to have impairments in movement similar to that in humans. However, the 2 groups differed in environment. One group was kept in standard housing, the other in an “enriched environment.” Since rodents are highly exploratory creatures, “enrichment” for rats and mice involves supplying them with wheels, tubes, food hoppers, small, open, wooden boxes and other interactive objects that they can explore (see Figure 1). In every two days, these are changed in their cages.
Over the course of time, some 160 days, an interesting result emerged (see Figure 2). Figure 2. To measure motor symptoms, the researchers placed five-month-old enriched and nonenriched mice on the central cylinder of a rotarod apparatus. The cylinder rotated, slowly at first, then accelerating. The amount of time a mouse remained on the rotating rod was a measure of Huntington’s disease-associated motor symptoms.
Nurture can Trump Nature. The animals that did not have the modified gene for Huntington’s predictably moved just fine throughout their lives. Those with the modified gene, however, in the standard housing lived out their genetic destiny and deteriorated in terms of their movement as they aged. In contrast, those with the enriched housing showed a marked difference, in that the age of onset was much later and the degree of impairment far more modest.
In the last 100,000 years there is no change happened to human brains. But you all noticed change in the intelligence of kids compared to kids from 40 years back. Why this happened? Remember the mice in the enriched environment. Like those mice, our current generation kids has a lot of care getting in their homes, which are filled with a lot of toys and house hold equipments like mobile phones, computer. Interacting with these equipments gave child brain to improve it.
So the environment has serious effect our brain. The experiment shows that even the hard coded gene’s behavior also can be altered by just changing the environment.
As we gets older there is a natural degradation happens in our brain. But brain is like other muscles. Muscles get strength if we do exercise. So can we give exercise to brain. Brain triggers and controls all physical activities. So if we practice activities that we know as well as new physical activities then it can strengthen those areas which controls them. For example, if you don’t know painting then learn it, if you don’t know swimming learn it etc. Engage yourself fully. Do not sit idle. Do focused tasks.
This is only one area. Second thing is improve your thoughts. Learn new subjects. Read non fiction. Do critical analysis of those things you leaned. Ask questions and then find answers for it. Long back our shop keepers sums cost of all the goods that we order for one month by heart. But today they cant even sum two numbers. Exercise is important practice it.