Shellfish and memory loss

Yet another tirade against the seafood mythology. Eating mussels and other shellfish is commonly accepted social norm and a quasi-outlet for flaunting the riches. No wonder, we eventually forget why we started "flaunting":

"It turns out that there's a neurotoxin, domoic acid, which can indeed cause brain damage including memory loss. It's produced by certainalgae, and can accumulate inside shellfish, especially mussels.

Domoic acid is responsible for amnesic shellfish poisoning, which struck a cluster of over 100 people in Canada in 1987; 4 died, and several others suffered permanent neurological symptoms, including epilepsy and most notoriously, anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories.

Autopsies revealed prominent damage to the hippocampus and nearby temporal lobe areas. Domoic acid victims were therefore very similar to Henry Molaison (HM), the most famous amnesia sufferer, whose memory loss was caused by the surgical removal of the same areas.

Domoic acid is related to kainic acid, which neuroscientists will have heard of: it's widely used in epilepsy research to give animals seizures, amongst other things. Both are excitotoxins - they kill neurons by over-activating them, which opens ion channels allowing calcium to enter the cell and reach toxic levels. They're able to do this because of their chemical similarity to glutamate, the brain's most common neurotransmitter (and the one that the drug ketamineantagonizes)."