By Paul R. Burghardt

A recent report by Xu and colleagues in the journal Diabetes, addresses one of the “modifiable risk-factors” for developing dementia. In other words, it tried to identify those things we do and control on a day-to-day basis that ultimately reduce or increase the likelihood of developing disease. These modifiable risk-factors include things like weight-management, blood pressure control, managing diabetes, and exercise. This study focused on how diabetes can influence the chances that we develop dementia depending upon genetic traits and when in the lifespan a person develops diabetes.

Since diabetes increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, as well as vascular dementia (yep, unfortunately there are a couple of ways to develop substantial cognitive decline), understanding how genetics and lifestyle choices interact during the development of disease will provide a lot of information that can be used for both prevention and treatment. We already know that avoiding diabetes, or managing diabetes effectively, is of the utmost importance.

To address the issue of how the development of diabetes relates to the risk for dementia, Xu and colleagues utilized the Swedish Twin Registry. This is a national survey in Sweden that tracks health information about twins, which is pretty cool for research purposes. Plus, it’s good to know the Doublemint girls are keeping busy, right?

Their general findings weren’t too surprising: diabetes increases the risk for developing dementia whether it be, vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. However, there were some distinct findings in this study emphasizing that timing is everything.

A particularly interesting finding was that the risk for dementia (vascular or Alzheimer’s disease) increased if a person developed diabetes before they turned 65. By the way, the most common time for Alzheimer’s disease diagnoses is in people 65 years of age or older. Remember, this disease takes a number of years to develop, so what you do now may have a substantial impact on how your brain ages.

This probably occurs by the amount of ‘wear-and-tear’ your brain is able to handle under diabetic conditions, particularly if you are genetically predisposed to developing dementia. The concept of cumulative wear-and-tear has a fancy name, “allostatic load.” This idea is important for all aspects of our health as it accounts for the interactions between our genes and environment in a time-dependent manner. But that is for another post….

In general, this study reiterates a couple of issues. First, it highlights the importance of the mind-body link. Although many people think that diabetes is a problem for blood sugar control, it influences a lot of other organs in our bodies, including our brains. Second, if you have a family history of diabetes the longer you avoid developing the disease the better this will be for your brain (and rest of your body).

Unfortunately in this study the authors weren’t able to look at individual’s ability to control/manage their diabetes. But I’d like to be optimistic and believe that better management of a disease like diabetes would help decrease its negative influence on other aspects of our biology. In line with this, please see our blog post for this Thursday!

Reference:
Diabetes. 2009 Jan;58(1):71-7. Epub 2008 Oct 24.

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By Simon J Evans, PhD

I ran across and interesting study recently suggesting that if we think faster we might feel better. There are plenty of anecdotes to back up this theory. People with bipolar (manic depression) disorder feel high levels of elation and positive mood during their rapid thought firing manic phases. Drugs that induce fast thinking states, like caffeine or amphetamines, also typically elevate mood. However, the new study asked whether we could deliberately improve our mood by engaging in fast thinking activities.

Researchers from Princeton and Harvard published their findings supporting this notion in a recent issue of the journal, Emotion. They recruited college students and set them up in various tasks that required either slow and careful thought or rapid fire brainstorming and then tested their mood and feelings of self-esteem right after the experiences.

What they found was that over six different kinds of experiments that manipulated thought speed, subjects in the ‘fast thinking’ group had improved mood every time. The fast thinkers also showed improved creativity, and self esteem and increased energy and sense of power in most of the tests.

These findings are easy to relate with. If you think about times when you really feel great and unstoppable, they were probably times when your mind was working clear and quickly. The cool thing about the research is that it suggests you can manipulate your mood (for the better) by deliberately doing things that require rapid thinking, like fast paced games, intense conversations or even rapid fire brain storming on your own.

Now, it’s likely that the benefit of fast thinking only applies when such thinking is beneficial. We’ve all had the experiences, lying awake at night, trying to shut off our brains and go to sleep. These times are certainly not mood elevating and are usually very frustrating. But during waking functional hours, this little trick may be a good tool to break out of negative mood states.

I think this actually ties nicely into another theory that I wrote about several months ago, put forth by Kelly Lambert from Randolph-Macon College. In her theory Dr. Lambert suggests that the lack of effort required for our survival today is partially responsible for increased rates of depression. After all, we don’t really have to work very hard to find food and shelter anymore. Dr Lambert suggests that this robs us of the rewarding feelings of success from overcoming challenges in our daily lives.

Both of these lines of research relate to quick thinking associated with problem solving. Both also point to the activation of the brain’s ‘reward centers’, controlled mostly by dopamine (which are also stimulated by many drugs of abuse).

When I look at these two lines of research I am reminded of the old adage “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.” We have spent centuries developing technologies to make our lives easier, but are we really benefiting from that? Some philosophers argue that human struggle is necessary for happiness. I’m sure there are entire volumes written on this topic, so will just leave it at that.

So if we’re not going to drop out of modern society and go live off the land, what can we do? Maybe we shouldn’t always look for the easy road. That message certainly applies to your physical health. No one has found the magic pill for diet and exercise yet. Maybe that message should apply to our emotional health as well.

Reference:
Emotion. 2008, 8(5):597-612

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By Simon J. Evans, PhD

The head bone connected to the neck bone, The neck bone connected to the back bone, The back bone connected to the thigh bone . . . Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk aroun’, Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun’. . . remember that song? It’s a basic principle. Your body systems are all connected up. So it should be no surprise that the health of your brain is connected to the health of your body and a new study revealed just how much.

We’ve known for some time that fit people feel better, and more recently discovered that they may also think better. Canadian researchers took this to the test by looking at how the physical fitness level 50 – 90 year old women predicted their cognitive abilities. Their research will be published in the March 2009 edition of the journal, Neurobiology of Aging.

The research team recruited 42 healthy post-menopausal women who were free of chronic illness and medication. They then evaluated their level of physical fitness using a standard exercise test and compared fitness levels to cerebral blood flow (blood supply to the brain) and a battery of cognitive performance tests.

Not surprisingly, women who reported getting regular exercise were more fit than women who were sedentary. But let’s explore for a minute what fitness actually means to these women. First, fitness significantly predicted the cerbrovascular health of these women, which is a fancy way to say that fit women had a better blood supply to their brains.

What does that mean? Basically, it means their brains can perform better and they proved it by doing better on all kinds of cognitive tests, including cognitive speed, perception, verbal ability and executive function. Even if you don’t know what all of these test measure, understand that the physically active women out-performed the sedentary women on every cognitive test the researchers through at them.

We all know that exercise helps our heart and arteries work better. For some people, that is motivation enough. However, only about 1-3 adults get any regular exercise so maybe we need a bigger motivator. Understanding that physical fitness will also make your brain work better might be the driver that many people need. While nobody wants diabetes and heart disease, people may work a little harder to stave off cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease and that’s what makes studies like this important.

Your brain uses up to 20% of the oxygen that you breathe. How does it get from your lungs to those brain circuits that remember where you put your keys? Answer: your blood supply and your neurovascular system. This new study shows that the more fit you are the more efficiently you will get blood to your brain and the smarter you will be.

Studies like this may not provide us with earth shattering revelations. The results are not surprising, but they give us evidence that how we choose to live effects how we think and feel. And evidence leads to recommendations, which lead to policy changes, which hopefully, someday will lead to health care systems that promote and reward you to stay fit. So next time you’re struggling with whether or not to get off the couch and go for a walk, think about your brain – while you still can.

Reference:
Brown et al. Neurobiology of Aging (2009) In Press

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By Simon J. Evans, PhD

Stress exposure can be a major problem for people. Exposure to violence through war, terrorism, rape or domestic violence can leave your psyche damaged and haunt you for years to come. The prevalence of global conflict and our awareness of it due to instant media access are causing psychologists to seek effective treatments for stress exposure to minimize the harm.

A recent study looked at the possibility of reducing post-traumatic stress disorder using the computer game, Tetris. While this might seem fantastic at first glance, let’s take a closer look at their reasoning and their findings.

Traumatic experiences are typically remembered in some visual and spatial way. The images of the event are reconstructed later by your brain as ‘flashbacks’ that can be triggered by some similar environment, a noise, a smell, or sometimes nothing at all. However, these images aren’t acquired by your brain immediately. There seems to be about a 6 hour time window following the event when the memories are consolidated and stored.

This is the first fact that researchers and clinicians can possibly take advantage of. If you can somehow disrupt those memories from forming in the 6 hour window, you might be able to dampen any long-term harm, or even prevent it. In fact, strategies have been used to do this, often using drugs that temporarily interfere with the brain’s chemistry and prevent memory formation.

The problem with this approach is that it can make all memories of the event unreliable. Sometimes having such memory can be beneficial. First, it can help prevent exposure to such events in the future. Second, you may need those memories to aid the prosecution in a criminal case. So what other approaches could researchers try?

Enter Tetris. Tetris is a visual-spatial game so uses the some of the same brain resources used to encode memories of a traumatic event. This was the reasoning behind trying to use it as way to interfere with traumatic memory consolidation. So did it work?

Researchers took 2 groups of healthy adults and showed them real videos of violence and death, which is a standard psychological tool to mimic exposure to trauma. After the videos, half the participants did nothing, while the other half played Tetris for ten minutes. Then throughout the next week participants were asked to keep track of any flashbacks they had relating to the violent and disturbing video exposure.

The Tetris player group had less than half the flashbacks of the non-player group, suggesting that playing Tetris interfered with their ability to consolidate the traumatic memories. But here’s the cool part. There was no difference between the groups in their ability to remember things about the videos. This means that the emotional impact of the experience was dampened, but the ability to recall facts about the experience was not.

Now, this study is not claiming that they can cure post-traumatic stress disorder by having soldiers or victims of violence play a little Tetris after a traumatic experience, although it may help a little. However, the study opens up the potential to develop new methods for helping victims of violence better cope in their future.

Current methods, including debriefing, can sometimes amplify the experience and actually make it worse, so psychologists are looking for new tools and this study may help lead to them.

In the short-term, maybe you should encourage your kids to wind down with a little Tetris after a hard battle playing Call of Duty:)

Resources: PLOS One, 2009, 4(1) e4153

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Paul R. Burghardt, PhD

A substantial number of Veterans will return from Iraq and Afghanistan over the next several years. This transition back to civilian life will not be trivial, and many of these individuals will need support to deal with the psychological stress they encountered while they were deployed.

An interesting study came out of a research group in Taiwan that could be used as a window into how we, the general public, can help our veterans as they return home. A study by Chung and colleagues in the Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics investigated which factors were related to cognitive and emotional health in older veterans.

The authors looked at a number of lifestyle factors and measured the level of depression and cognitive function in older veterans. What they found wasn’t exceptionally surprising, but illustrates the importance of working to build up your brain-fitness reserve.

Veterans who could read, were married, and had children or family, who didn’t smoke, avoided fatty foods, exercised for 30 minutes a day, and engaged in a hobby, had higher levels of cognitive function. The most important aspects for maintaining a higher level of cognitive function were level of depression, education, and being able to read. Depression plays a substantial role in both brain and general health, and is believed to worsen the cognitive decline in people with dementia. The prevention or effective management of depression will be an extremely important task for veterans.

Literacy is an important aspect of maintaining cognitive health. We’ve known for some time people with more education tend to have less risk of developing dementia, which was also true in this study. However, the most important aspect to education is continually challenging yourself to learn, not obtaining a degree per se.

An interesting aspect of this study was the large number of veterans who were illiterate. It’s probably obvious that illiteracy severely limits a person’s options for learning. If you couldn’t read, you wouldn’t be reading this article right now. I know it sounds obvious, but imagine all the things you read as you go about your daily tasks. Street signs, ordering food, that motion sickness-inducing news ticker at the bottom of your favorite 24-hour cable news channel. You’d miss out on a lot.

This report should really drive home how critical lifestyle choices, like diet, exercise and mental activity, can be for brain health particularly for people who have undergone substantial psychological stress. In addition, the role for social support cannot be understated. Just having someone there to interact with, help you through tough times, or just listen, is invaluable. Most creatures need social interaction, and humans are no exception. When times are tough it’s nice to know you’re not alone.

Reference:
Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics. 2008 Dec 4

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