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Brain tissue loss and some mental illness

Has anyone read any of the articles out there about MRI's and some mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and BP? I read one the other day that said something about people w/ BP have a loss of grey matter in their brain and it might be associated w/ BP. I don't know much about it but was wondering if you had heard anything about that?

I have had an MRI bacause of auras (migraine no headache). I had 2 EEG's done last year to see if the migraine aura's I was having were actually just aura's and not seizures and found it was abnormal and that I have a slowing in the Parietal and Occipital lobes, they actually don't know the cause of this. I have quite a bit of white matter also I was told, which means dead parts of my brain. This can also be caused by the migraines so I was told. But I am wondering if anyone knows anything about this subject??? I know, best left to the professionals, but I'm just curious if anyone has read the articles and what you all think?
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1102233 tn?1308506220
Where might I find this article? It sounds fascinating.  I had temporal lobe epilepsy when I was younger that mysteriously disappeared over the past several years.  No one knows why.  I'm left with bipolar disorder.  I wonder if there is any data somewhere to correlate my type of epilepsy with Bipolar. Anyhow, if you could tell me where to find the article, I'd appreciate it.
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Avatar universal
That would make sense for me considering my past history of **** that happened to my brain at really young ages.
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1100992 tn?1262357216
I read an article once about people with mental issues sometimes having underdeveloped parts of their brains, but it wasn't dead...just didn't fully develop in the first place.
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Avatar universal
Probably a little late in saying this but I thought that the white matter in the brain wasn't so much dead as it is just a communications medium for the gray matter in the brain.
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994257 tn?1266242692
We are the exact same!!!! I have optical migraines (with no headache also).  I also have MRI with a whole bunch of white matter hyperintensites in the front part of my brain, and my visual evoked potential test was abnormal.  Neurologist has no clue why.  I am actually getting a psyc evaulation on tuesday to see if there might be a connection, and to see if I might actually be bipolar.  Please keep me posted if you find out anything.
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Avatar universal
I know that the best person to ask is a neurologist, I just can't seem to find someone that knows what my abnormality is!

As for the article's I was curious if anyone had read it, I thought it was so interesting.
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585414 tn?1288941302
First of all in a practical sense the question you are asking is best posed to a neurologist. Migraines are complex and have a variety of causes. As for the loss of brain tissue I read that article too. One thing I can say is that has nothing to do with your migraines. If you want to look at the photos I posted on my personal page there is one (in the public domain) of a PET scan of a brain with a person with schizophrenia and there are massive deficits in the area of the brain that processes thoughts. I may undergo a PET scan myself to see if a person on the next generation antipsychotics does not have or has less of those deficits but that would be in a clinical journal if published so I couldn't post that. Its more schizophrenia than bipolar that causes shrinking of the brain over time. There's nothing wrong with reading clinical articles. Its just generally not a good idea to apply them to yourself because it takes controlled studies on a large scale to determine conclusive results for anything.
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