Neurological Conditions Archive

Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) affects up to a million Americans, more than three-quarters of whom are women. A main feature of POTS is an intolerance to being upright. Symptoms include heart rate spikes, palpitations, dizziness, and fatigue. Risk factors include recent viral infection, surgery, concussion, or a long period of inactivity. POTS symptoms can be managed through exercising, drinking more fluids, increasing salt intake, wearing compression garments, and using counter-pulsation poses.

With ticks thriving in a wider geographic range, appearing earlier and sticking around later, it's important to stay vigilant about protecting yourself against ticks that cause Lyme disease and other illnesses. Learn some steps you can take to avoid tick bites.

Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) is an uncommon illness with symptoms that are somewhat similar to polio — weakness and loss of muscle tone in the arms and legs. AFM occurs most often in children and treatment is largely supportive.

Brain damage can cause the language disorder aphasia. It affects a person's ability to understand or produce speech. Coping with aphasia requires treatment for the underlying cause and speech therapy to learn how to communicate despite language deficits. If the cause of the aphasia improves, so may the aphasia. But many people will continue to live with some level of aphasia, especially if the cause of brain damage is a progressive disease, such as Alzheimer's.

Migraines can last hours or days and span several distinct phases. A post-headache phase leaves as many as four out of five migraine sufferers feeling like they have a hangover. Experts recommend different approaches to help ward off lingering symptoms depending on their intensity.

A 2022 Harvard study suggests that an Epstein-Barr virus infection, the most common cause of mononucleosis, may trigger multiple sclerosis (MS) in some people.

The vast majority of diseases do not have a single cause; rather, multiple factors combine to cause a disease. Growing evidence suggests that several viruses may be triggers of multiple sclerosis, and a long-term study found evidence that an infection with a common virus can be an important contributing factor in MS.

Though decades of research have suggested risk factors for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a specific cause remains unknown. New research studied professional football players and found that they had a much higher risk of developing ALS than men in the general population, though the study was only observational.