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News Medical: CPAP treatment restores brain stem function, reverses health changes linked to heart disease CPAP treatment restores brain stem function, reverses health changes linked to heart disease What is the brainstem? Your brainstem connects your brain to your spinal cord. It sits near the bottom of your brain.
Understanding the Context
It helps regulate vital body functions that you don’t have to think about, like breathing and your heart rate. Your brainstem also helps with your balance, coordination and reflexes. The brainstem connects the brain to the spinal cord and regulates automatic, life-sustaining functions. It controls breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, consciousness, and reflexes like swallowing.
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The brainstem is key to functions that include heart and breathing rate, as well as coordination, balance, taste and smell, and the sleep-wake cycle. Stroke, brain tumors, and Parkinson's disease are among conditions that can affect the brainstem. The brainstem has integrative functions being involved in cardiovascular system control, respiratory control, pain sensitivity control, alertness, awareness, and consciousness. The main functions of the brainstem include the regulation of breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and several other lower order processes fundamental for survival. The brainstem also houses most cranial nerve nuclei and is a passageway for ascending and descending neural pathways.
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Learn about the brainstem. Find out how this critical part of your brain functions and health problems that can affect it. The brainstem forms the connection between the spinal cord and higher brain centres, coordinating vital autonomic functions and housing cranial nerve nuclei. This section introduces its major components and internal organisation. Topics include the midbrain, pons and medulla oblongata. Brainstem, area at the base of the brain that lies between the deep structures of the cerebral hemispheres and the cervical spinal cord.
The brainstem acts as an automatic control center for important involuntary actions of the body, including heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, and swallowing. In vertebrate anatomy, the brainstem is the most inferior portion of the brain, adjoining and structurally continuous with the brain and spinal cord. The brainstem gives rise to cranial nerves 3 through 12 and provides the main motor and sensory innervation to the face and neck via the cranial nerves.