Questões de Inglês

THE BRAIN

The brain controls all the body’s functions – from

consciousness and heart rate to thinking, memory

and emotion. It is the most complex thing we know of,

and the gaps in our knowledge about how it works are

vast. Neuroscientists have the daunting job of making

sense of this complicated organ – to provide insights

into our minds and behaviour and to find ways to

tackle debilitating brain diseases and injuries. Brain

injuries can occur in many ways, such as through

accidents, stroke or infections. The rehabilitation

group at the Medical Research Council Cognition

and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge specialises

in helping people with brain injuries to compensate

for cognitive problems and to cope with everyday life.

Its work includes developing new ways to measure

the problems faced by people with brain injuries and

developing new treatments. The scientists are also

interested in finding out more about how people

recover from brain injury and related memory loss.

The brain stem controls our core body functions –

the things our body must do unconsciously to keep us

alive, such as altering our heart beat and regulating

our blood pressure and body temperature. It also

controls functions such as alertness, swallowing,

digestion and breathing.

Consciousness is part of what makes each of us

unique. It encompasses many of our ideas, thoughts,

feelings, plans and memories. Conscious thought is

different from the unconscious workings of the brain

– which enable us to breathe, walk and talk and our

hearts to beat automatically. There are two aspects to

consciousness: awareness and wakefulness.

— Awareness refers to our internal, subjective

experience. It includes self awareness – the ability to

understand that you exist, as an individual, separate

from other people and with private thoughts. It also

includes awareness of the relationship between

oneself and one’s environment through use of our

senses and by thinking about ideas and acting upon

them using judgement.

— Wakefulness refers to different levels of

conscious awareness. Each day we experience a

spectrum of wakefulness, from full attentiveness, such

as if we are involved in an interesting conversation,

through inattentiveness, drowsiness and normal

sleep. Following some types of brain injury or during

anaesthesia people can’t be woken: they have a lower

level of wakefulness. Brain death lies at the far end of

this spectrum.

These two aspects of consciousness normally go

hand-in-hand; we don’t expect to have an interesting

conversation with someone who is asleep. However,

we can possess awareness when we are asleep, for

example when we dream.

Where does consciousness come from?

Scientists have amassed much evidence linking

different aspects of consciousness to our brain. We

now know that consciousness requires many parts of

the brain to work together. Parts of the cerebral cortex

act together to produce our thoughts and experiences.

A functioning thalamus is also required to produce

wakefulness – we know this because if a part of the

thalamus called the centromedian nucleus becomes

damaged, we become unconscious.

Unconsciousness can also be caused by

anaesthesia, or changes to the body’s internal

environment such as a rise or drop in core body

temperature or a lack of oxygen. A prolonged period

of unconsciousness is known as a coma. Sometimes,

after a severe brain injury, a person can enter a

vegetative state (VS). Unlike coma patients, VS

patients show normal wake/sleep cycles, but even

when they are awake they show no external sign of

awareness. When all electrical activity in the brain

stops irreversibly, this is known as brain death.

Scientists at the MRC Cognition and Brain

Sciences Unit in Cambridge study patients with

disorders of consciousness. Their work recently

revealed that a woman who was diagnosed as

being in a persistent vegetative state following

a car accident was aware of her surroundings.

Working with colleagues in Belgium, the scientists

used functional magnetic resonance imaging

(fMRI) to map the woman’s brain activity. She was

physically unresponsive and fulfilled all the criteria

for a diagnosis of vegetative state according to

international guidelines. But scans showed that her

brain responded to speech. Her brain also actively

processed the meaning of sentences, becoming

more active when she heard sentences containing

words with several meanings, like ‘rain’ and ‘reign’.

When asked to imagine playing tennis or moving

around her home, brain scans showed that the

woman could do this, activating various areas of her

brain in the same way as healthy volunteers. “These

are startling results. They confirm that, despite the

diagnosis of vegetative state, this patient retained

the ability to understand spoken commands and

to respond to them through her brain activity,” said

one of the researchers. “Her decision to work with

us represents a clear act of intent which confirmed

beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of

herself and her surroundings.”

Doctors use different levels of sedation to reduce

people’s awareness of their bodies and surroundings.

For example, high levels of anaesthetic drugs cause

general anaesthesia: a complete loss of consciousness.

Another team of scientists at the MRC Cognition and

Brain Sciences Unit used fMRI to study how sedation

affects the brain’s processing of speech. Working with

researchers at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre in

Cambridge, they found that during heavy sedation,

volunteers’ brains still responded to the sounds of

speech but they were unable to process or remember

it. The findings have important implications for the care

of patients undergoing general anaesthesia or coming

out of a coma.

Available at: <http://www.mrc.ac.uk/publications/browse/the-brain-mrc- -research-for-lifelong-health/>. Retrieved on: 28 June 2016. Adapted.

THE BRAIN

The brain controls all the body’s functions – from

consciousness and heart rate to thinking, memory

and emotion. It is the most complex thing we know of,

and the gaps in our knowledge about how it works are

vast. Neuroscientists have the daunting job of making

sense of this complicated organ – to provide insights

into our minds and behaviour and to find ways to

tackle debilitating brain diseases and injuries. Brain

injuries can occur in many ways, such as through

accidents, stroke or infections. The rehabilitation

group at the Medical Research Council Cognition

and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge specialises

in helping people with brain injuries to compensate

for cognitive problems and to cope with everyday life.

Its work includes developing new ways to measure

the problems faced by people with brain injuries and

developing new treatments. The scientists are also

interested in finding out more about how people

recover from brain injury and related memory loss.

The brain stem controls our core body functions –

the things our body must do unconsciously to keep us

alive, such as altering our heart beat and regulating

our blood pressure and body temperature. It also

controls functions such as alertness, swallowing,

digestion and breathing.

Consciousness is part of what makes each of us

unique. It encompasses many of our ideas, thoughts,

feelings, plans and memories. Conscious thought is

different from the unconscious workings of the brain

– which enable us to breathe, walk and talk and our

hearts to beat automatically. There are two aspects to

consciousness: awareness and wakefulness.

— Awareness refers to our internal, subjective

experience. It includes self awareness – the ability to

understand that you exist, as an individual, separate

from other people and with private thoughts. It also

includes awareness of the relationship between

oneself and one’s environment through use of our

senses and by thinking about ideas and acting upon

them using judgement.

— Wakefulness refers to different levels of

conscious awareness. Each day we experience a

spectrum of wakefulness, from full attentiveness, such

as if we are involved in an interesting conversation,

through inattentiveness, drowsiness and normal

sleep. Following some types of brain injury or during

anaesthesia people can’t be woken: they have a lower

level of wakefulness. Brain death lies at the far end of

this spectrum.

These two aspects of consciousness normally go

hand-in-hand; we don’t expect to have an interesting

conversation with someone who is asleep. However,

we can possess awareness when we are asleep, for

example when we dream.

Where does consciousness come from?

Scientists have amassed much evidence linking

different aspects of consciousness to our brain. We

now know that consciousness requires many parts of

the brain to work together. Parts of the cerebral cortex

act together to produce our thoughts and experiences.

A functioning thalamus is also required to produce

wakefulness – we know this because if a part of the

thalamus called the centromedian nucleus becomes

damaged, we become unconscious.

Unconsciousness can also be caused by

anaesthesia, or changes to the body’s internal

environment such as a rise or drop in core body

temperature or a lack of oxygen. A prolonged period

of unconsciousness is known as a coma. Sometimes,

after a severe brain injury, a person can enter a

vegetative state (VS). Unlike coma patients, VS

patients show normal wake/sleep cycles, but even

when they are awake they show no external sign of

awareness. When all electrical activity in the brain

stops irreversibly, this is known as brain death.

Scientists at the MRC Cognition and Brain

Sciences Unit in Cambridge study patients with

disorders of consciousness. Their work recently

revealed that a woman who was diagnosed as

being in a persistent vegetative state following

a car accident was aware of her surroundings.

Working with colleagues in Belgium, the scientists

used functional magnetic resonance imaging

(fMRI) to map the woman’s brain activity. She was

physically unresponsive and fulfilled all the criteria

for a diagnosis of vegetative state according to

international guidelines. But scans showed that her

brain responded to speech. Her brain also actively

processed the meaning of sentences, becoming

more active when she heard sentences containing

words with several meanings, like ‘rain’ and ‘reign’.

When asked to imagine playing tennis or moving

around her home, brain scans showed that the

woman could do this, activating various areas of her

brain in the same way as healthy volunteers. “These

are startling results. They confirm that, despite the

diagnosis of vegetative state, this patient retained

the ability to understand spoken commands and

to respond to them through her brain activity,” said

one of the researchers. “Her decision to work with

us represents a clear act of intent which confirmed

beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of

herself and her surroundings.”

Doctors use different levels of sedation to reduce

people’s awareness of their bodies and surroundings.

For example, high levels of anaesthetic drugs cause

general anaesthesia: a complete loss of consciousness.

Another team of scientists at the MRC Cognition and

Brain Sciences Unit used fMRI to study how sedation

affects the brain’s processing of speech. Working with

researchers at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre in

Cambridge, they found that during heavy sedation,

volunteers’ brains still responded to the sounds of

speech but they were unable to process or remember

it. The findings have important implications for the care

of patients undergoing general anaesthesia or coming

out of a coma.

Available at: <http://www.mrc.ac.uk/publications/browse/the-brain-mrc- -research-for-lifelong-health/>. Retrieved on: 28 June 2016. Adapted.

Alcohol is more dangerous than heroin

A recent study in the UK has found out that alcohol is, surprisingly, more dangerous than heroin or crack. Scientists examined 20 drugs and their effects on people and society. While heroin and crack were considered to be very harmful to individuals, heroin, alcohol and cocaine are the worst for society. The study found out that alcohol had the worst overall effects. The study also said that tobacco was at least as harmful as cocaine. Ecstasy, LSD and marijuana were considered to be the drugs that cause the least damage. Substances were marked from 0 to 100 on a scale. Alcohol received 72, the highest rating, while heroin was rated at 55 and crack at 54.

Researchers looked at 16 factors in their study, including a drug’s effect on the brain and body, how it affects the crime rate as well as the costs for the economy. Although cocaine is more addictive, alcohol is the most harmful drug our society because it is most widely used. It does the most damage to the world around us.

Alcohol is drunken by a large part of the population as a social drink. It makes you happy and loosens you up. When it enters the brain it produces a chemical called dopamine. This makes you feel happy and without stress. However, too much alcohol consumption can lead to the destruction of almost all parts of your body. People who drink alcohol are more likely to drive in a drunken state or commit violent acts. The World Health Organization estimates that alcohol causes about 3 million deaths every year, including suicides, car accidents and heart and liver diseases.

Banning alcohol is not the same as forbidding LSD, cocaine or other drugs. It is part of our culture, but the report concludes that governments should do more to educate the population and point out the dangers of alcohol consumption. Especially younger people are at a high risk. They like to combine energy drinks with alcohol. These alcopops taste good but contain a lot of alcohol and are high on calories, which leads to obesity.

(www.english-online.at. Adaptado.)

If all of the children who currently are sedentary started exercising every day, societies could save enormous amounts of money in the coming decades and have healthier citizens as a whole, according to a remarkable new study. In the United States alone, we could expect to save more than $120 billion every year in health care and associated expenses. The study is the first to usesophisticated computer simulations to arrive at a literal and sobering societal price tag for allowing our children to be sedentary. Inactivity is, of course, widespread among young people today. Recent research shows that in the

United States and Europe, physical activity tends to peak at about age 7 for both boys and girls and tail off continually throughout adolescence. More than two-thirds of children in theUnited States rarely exercise at all. The immediate health consequences for inactive children and their families are worrisome. Childhood obesity, which is linked to lack of exercise, is common, as is the incidence of Type 2 diabetes and other health problems related to being overweight among children as young as 6. But the long-term financial costs ofinactivity in the young, both for them and society as a whole, have never been quantified. So for the new study, which was published this week in Health Affairs, researchers with the Global Obesity Prevention Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and other institutions decided to create a bogglingly complex computer model of what the future could look like if we do or do not get more of our children moving.

The researchers began by gathering as much public data as is currently available about the health, weight and physical activity patterns of all 31.7 million American children now aged 8 to 11, using large-scale databases from the Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other groups. The researchers fed this information into a computerized modeling program that created an electronic avatar for every American child today. In line with reality, two-thirds of these children were programmed to rarely exercise and many were overweight or obese.The scientists then had the simulated children grow up. Using estimations about how calorie intake and activity patterns affect body weight, the program changed each virtual child’s body day-by-day and year-by-year into adulthood. Most became increasingly overweight. As the simulated children became adults,the scientists then modeled each one’s health, based on obesity-associated risks for heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer, and also the probable financial price of dealing with those diseases (adjusted for future inflation), both in terms of direct expenses for hospitalizations, drugs and so on, and lost productivity because of someone’s being ill.

The results were staggering. According to the computer model, the costs of today’s 8- to 11- year-olds being inactive and consequently overweight would be almost $3 trillion in medical expenses and lost productivity every year once the children reached adulthood and for decades until

their deaths.

But when the researchers tweaked children’s activity levels within their model, thenumbers began to look quite different. If they presumed that, in an imaginary America, half of all children exercised vigorously for about 25 minutes three times a week, such as during active recess or sports or, more ambitiously, ran around and moved for at least an hour every day, which is the amount of youth exercise recommended by the C.D.C., their virtual lives were transformed. Most obviously, the incidence of childhood obesity fell by more than 4 percent, a change that resonated throughout the simulated children’s lives and society. There were about half a million fewer cases of adult-onset heart disease, diabetes, cancer and strokes in this simulation, and the society-wide costs associated with these illnesses dropped by about $32 billion every year if the children romped about for 25 minutes three times per week and by almost $37 billion if they moved for an hour every day.

The impacts were even more substantial when the researchers assumed that 100 percent of the children who are now sedentary got regular exercise. In this scenario, the annual total costs during adulthood from obesity-associated medical expenses and lost productivity plummeted by about $62 billion when children were active three times a week and by more than $120 billion every year when all of the virtual children played and moved for at least an hour each day.

From: https://www.nytimes.com May 3, 2017

T E X T

  If all of the children who currently are sedentary started exercising every day, societies could save enormous amounts of money in the coming decades and have healthier citizens as a whole, according to a remarkable new study. In the United States alone, we could expect to save more than $120 billion every year in health care and associated expenses. The study is the first to usesophisticated computer simulations to arrive at a literal and sobering societal price tag for allowing our children to be sedentary. Inactivity is, of course, widespread among young people today. Recent research shows that in the

  United States and Europe, physical activity tends to peak at about age 7 for both boys and girls and tail off continually throughout adolescence. More than two-thirds of children in theUnited States rarely exercise at all. The immediate health consequences for inactive children and their families are worrisome. Childhood obesity, which is linked to lack of exercise, is common, as is the incidence of Type 2 diabetes and other health problems related to being overweight among children as young as 6. But the long-term financial costs ofinactivity in the young, both for them and society as a whole, have never been quantified. So for the new study, which was published this week in Health Affairs, researchers with the Global Obesity Prevention Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and other institutions decided to create a bogglingly complex computer model of what the future could look like if we do or do not get more of our children moving.

  The researchers began by gathering as much public data as is currently available about the health, weight and physical activity patterns of all 31.7 million American children now aged 8 to 11, using large-scale databases from the Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other groups. The researchers fed this information into a computerized modeling program that created an electronic avatar for every American child today. In line with reality, two-thirds of these children were programmed to rarely exercise and many were overweight or obese.The scientists then had the simulated children grow up. Using estimations about how calorie intake and activity patterns affect body weight, the program changed each virtual child’s body day-by-day and year-by-year into adulthood. Most became increasingly overweight. As the simulated children became adults,the scientists then modeled each one’s health, based on obesity-associated risks for heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer, and also the probable financial price of dealing with those diseases (adjusted for future inflation), both in terms of direct expenses for hospitalizations, drugs and so on, and lost productivity because of someone’s being ill.

  The results were staggering. According to the computer model, the costs of today’s 8- to 11- year-olds being inactive and consequently overweight would be almost $3 trillion in medical expenses and lost productivity every year once the children reached adulthood and for decades until

their deaths.

  But when the researchers tweaked children’s activity levels within their model, thenumbers began to look quite different. If they presumed that, in an imaginary America, half of all children exercised vigorously for about 25 minutes three times a week, such as during active recess or sports or, more ambitiously, ran around and moved for at least an hour every day, which is the amount of youth exercise recommended by the C.D.C., their virtual lives were transformed. Most obviously, the incidence of childhood obesity fell by more than 4 percent, a change that resonated throughout the simulated children’s lives and society. There were about half a million fewer cases of adult-onset heart disease, diabetes, cancer and strokes in this simulation, and the society-wide costs associated with these illnesses dropped by about $32 billion every year if the children romped about for 25 minutes three times per week and by almost $37 billion if they moved for an hour every day.

  The impacts were even more substantial when the researchers assumed that 100 percent of the children who are now sedentary got regular exercise. In this scenario, the annual total costs during adulthood from obesity-associated medical expenses and lost productivity plummeted by about $62 billion when children were active three times a week and by more than $120 billion every year when all of the virtual children played and moved for at least an hour each day.

From: https://www.nytimes.com May 3, 2017