IUBio

the brain's energy consumption

John E. Anderson jander at OSPREY.UNF.EDU
Mon Apr 28 18:43:43 EST 1997


Hi

(This post didn't seem to come through the first time I posted it. 
Sorry if this is a duplicate...)

Kandel etal's _Principles of Neural Science, 3rd ed_ states
(pp1043-1044)

"Although the human brain constitutes only 2% of the total weight of the
body, it receives about 15% of the cardiac output and its oxygen
consumption is approximately 20% of that for the total body."

Presumably this is related to the amount of energy consumed by the
brain, which is quite high compared to other organs as well.  One
MEDLINE abstract I found says that the brain's energy consumption is
twice that of the heart, for example. Does anyone have a list of what
brain processes use all this energy? Does maintaining the ionic gradient
across membranes consume most of it?  What proportion is used by
processes that reorganize or change the weights of synaptic connections?

I couldn't find answers to these questions in the abstracts of a quick
MEDLINE search, and I don't have easy access to the journal articles
that did come up, so I'm hoping to mine the knowledge of the list.  Any
help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

John Anderson
--
John E. Anderson
jander at unf.edu




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