Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

November 13, 2014

Stupid people might be stupid because of a virus infection

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:37 PM

All of us know stupid people and at times have thought about how could a human be so dumb and still survive. Now after years of research Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska have found a possible reason for some of the folks being so dumb. There is a virus that exists in the green algae found in ponds and lakes that affects cognitive functions in the brain. In their tests 44% of the test subjects had the virus infection and those who tested positive for the virus scored 7-9 points lower on tests designed to measure the brain’s accuracy and speed.

They then ran some tests on mice after infecting them with the virus and found that the infected mice had a harder time exiting from the test maze than uninfected mice.

The researchers were conducting a completely unrelated study into throat microbes when they realised that DNA in the throats of healthy people matched the DNA of a chlorovirus virus known as ATCV-1.

ATCV-1 is a virus that infects the green algae found in freshwater lakes and ponds. It had previously been thought to be non-infectious to humans, but the scientists found that it actually affects cognitive functions in the brain by shortening attention span and causing a decrease in spatial awareness.

The researchers then studied how ATCV-1 affected mice by injecting the virus into their digestive tracts.

They then put the mice into a maze, where the animals infected by the virus had a more difficult time finding their way round and were less likely to pay attention to a new object or notice a new entry that had been previously inaccessible.

ATCV-1 was able to get into the hippocampus pathways of the mice and alter the expression of genes relating to memory formation, learning and synaptic plasticity (an important foundation of learning and memory), as well as how the immune systems of the mice responded to being exposed to the virus.

The full study is is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.

Thanks to Slashdot.org for the link to the original story.

– Suramya

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