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Blood flow in the brain
Vigilance center
Aerobic metabolism
Deoxyglucose
Metabolism in the brain
Cardiac arrest
Asphyxia/ suffocation





Alcohol toxicity
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Pyrithiamine poison
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Other poisons
Auditory agnosia
Time-table of myelination
Trophic growth factors
The Bohr Effect of Hemoglobin
The cerebral cortex is most predictably susceptible
to damage from circulatory insufficiency or hypoxia.
The brainstem pattern of damage has long been
reported and discussed as an unusual finding in
cases of complete circulalatory arrest (Janzer &
Friede 1980)
Sparing of the inferior colliculi and other
brainstem nuclei of high metabolic rate can be
explained by the Bohr effect of hemoglobin -- the
release of oxygen more readily in an environment
of high carbon dioxide, the major end-product of
aerobic metabolism.
Under hypoxic conditions, hemoglobin may have
given up all the oxygen it carried to more
metabolically active areas like the inferior colliculi,
with nothing left by the time it circulates to the
cerebral cortex
. . . . . .
Christian Bohr (1855-1911)
The dynamic binding or release of oxygen and carbon
dioxide in response to the relative abundance of these
components of aerobic metabolism was described by
Bohr and his assistants in 1904, and commemorated
in Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, Nov2004, Vol. 182
Issue 3.
The biological function of the CO2 effect was
clearly recognized by Bohr and colleagues:
CO2 entering the tissue capillaries promotes
the release of oxygen by decreasing the
blood O2 affinity... (Jensen 2004)
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