wellness weekly

The Changing Brain: In my recent studies of addiction I learned exactly how drugs affect the brain and that nicotine for instance specifically causes neurotransmitter release and a host of “feelings” in response. Now that I am “off running” do to an injury, I know too that running causes certain “feelings” that I have come to crave. Drugs and running aren’t the only things that can cause the central nervous system to change. Overeating does as well. When one consumes an abundance of calories, as many a person does, and that person’ becomes obese, a certain chemical that is not usually active becomes so. It is like the appendix. We have one, but we do not need it. We also have a compound in the hypothalamus that when activated, causes an immune response and inflammation. As you may recall, inflammation is often an indication of heart disease and is associated with obesity. This news is from a study recently completed in mice and it is just one of many that are being conducted in order to better understand and treat obesity. The study author is Dongsheng Cai and she is with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While waiting for the magic pill it would be a good idea to stay active and maintain a health promoting weight.

Advair: I heard a commercial for this medication where the announcer suggested that YOU ask your doctor if Advair would improve your lung function. And the commercial states that Advair is used to treat COPD. Now COPD includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis and is often associated with smoking. In fact, 90 percent of emphysema is caused by smoking. So in my mind, the person with COPD would be better off asking their doctor how quitting smoking could improve their lung function.

Move More: The Department of Health and Human Services made a statement this week that is intended to reduce the confusion surrounding how much physical activity, how many minutes a day, a person needs to maintain health. As soon as I saw the words, reduce confusion I prepared myself for the opposite. So, I hope that I can give you the recommendations with less if, ands or buts. Sigh. First, it depends on if you are already active, sort of active or just plain sluggish and then if you are young or old and then….. See what I mean! The government put a panel of experts together and they support the research that physical activity may be the most important thing you can do to prevent many diseases, and this includes, heart disease, colon and breast cancer, hypertension and diabetes. Regular physical activity, the kind that increases your heart rate, can lower you heart attack and stroke risk by 20% and can also help to prevent fractures and depression. This is NOT NEW NEWS; it is just getting the official seal. The recommendations don’t seem any different to me either, but here they are. First and foremost, ANY amount is better than NONE and MORE is better. The amount of time you need to spend depends on the intensity of the exercise. You can walk an hour or run for 30 minutes, for example. Children should exercise an hour a day and adults about 2 and a half hours a week, minimum. If you are doing nothing, then you start with ten to twenty a day or every other day and build on to that. Like I said, the recommendation is dependent on where YOU are now, at baseline. Feel free to post comments if you want more personal direction.

Do You Really Need that Drug? Okay, a study in the journal Neuron tells of mice who were trained to equate a sound that they hear with positive sense of self, safety, will to live. And I totally understand the conditioning piece of this experiment because it is like Pavlov and the dog. It is about strong, powerful, primitive associations. The horror of this is how the study was done and that this is HOW studies are done. For many scientists, and apparently many pharmaceutical company researchers, the way to see if a drug can improve mood is to first cause an animal to feel really hopeless. They use learned helplessness in that they have mice swim until they are exhausted and then they give up as if to drown. They just turn over and float and then the researcher might give them the drug in question, it acts on the brain, stimulates a will to live and the mouse begins to swim again. So in this new experiment, the mice were taught first to fear a sound and then to welcome the sound. I guess the first way was a test. They shocked the mice at the exact time the sound rang, then another conditioning experiment was for the mouse to be in pain except when they played the sound. OMG, it seems so very cruel to me. In this experiment the researchers used just the tone and also used a drug. They both caused a neurotransmitter response, but not the same one. Interesting! The conditioned sound response was dopamine and the pill was serotonin. (these are the two of the chemicals released by nicotine, BTW) So maybe we can condition people to meditate or associate some calming thing, music for example, with happiness and obviate at least some antidepressant meds as they are crazy full of side effects. Dr. Eric Kandel led this research.



That’s all for now, happy weekend.