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And anticholinergics are the current rage for a host of disorders.

People take anticholinergic drugs for symptoms ranging from COPD and asthma to excessive sweating and overactive urination.

They’re prescribed for people with Parkinson’s tremors, and even for motion sickness.

But are these common drugs shrinking your brain?

Anticholinergics are a type of neurotransmitter blocker that affect involuntary impulses such as breathing and so on.

Here’s a partial list of Anticholinergics:

Certain heartburn medications and even medications such as Xanax have some anticholinergic activity.

But the above list is probably the most important for our purposes.

This study looked at people who were around 73 years old,

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These were people that were taking any of a variety of these anticholinergic medications.

Anticholinergic drugs are commonly prescribed to elderly people these days.

But one important point is that these are “cognitively normal” older people.

They did not have Alzheimer’s.

They did not suffer from any brain dysfunction at all.

But after taking these anticholinergics, their brain functions tested poorly.

The study found that these people had much poorer memories and poorer thinking processes.

In fact, brain scans showed that their brains are smaller than usual:

Reduced total cortical volume and temporal lobe cortical thickness and greater lateral ventricle and inferior lateral ventricle volumes were seen in the participants relative to the non-anticholinergic participants.

This is a pretty striking finding.

It is not surprising because anticholinergic drugs lower the effects of choline.

And choline is vital to the brain, the liver, and all the cells.

These results were true even of people taking just one of these drugs for a while.

In summary, we observed that cognitively normal older adults taking medications with medium or high anticholinergic activity showed poorer cognition, reduced cerebral glucose metabolism, increased brain atrophy, and increased clinical decline compared with those not taking these medications and that these symptoms were greatest in older adults with the highest total anticholinergic medication burden.

So just beware if you or someone you know are taking these drugs.

You may want to switch to something else.

And you may want to consider switching doctors.

Your doctor should be aware of these dangers and should not be prescribing these types of drugs anyway.

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Matt Cook is editor-in-chief of Daily Medical Discoveries. Matt has been a full time health researcher for 26 years. ABC News interviewed Matt on sexual health issues not long ago. Matt is widely quoted on over 1,000,000 websites. He has over 300,000 daily newsletter readers. Daily Medical Discoveries finds hidden, buried or ignored medical studies through the lens of 100 years of proven science. Matt heads up the editorial team of scientists and health researchers. Each discovery is based upon primary studies from peer reviewed science sources following the Daily Medical Discoveries 7 Step Process to ensure accuracy.