This is one question researchers set out to answer in a recent study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, published. Many studies have focused on different nutrients as playing a role in mental health, but this group wanted to look at diet patterns as a whole to determine what big dietary factors might be affecting your mood.

The research team, from the University College of London and lead by Dr. Tasnime Akbaraly, used data from a large study called the Whitehall II study, which monitored many social, lifestyle, work and health factors in a group of over 10,000 British civil servants. Dr. Akbaraly’s team focused on evaluating whether what people ate affected their odds of becoming depressed, using a subset of approximately 3,500 people, for whom this data was available.

The researchers used a food questionnaire to lump dietary patterns into two major groups: a whole foods group (heavily loaded with fruits, vegetables and fish) and a processed food group (heavily loaded with sweets, fried foods, high-fat dairy, and processed grains and meats). What they found was that those who ate more of the whole foods or less of the process foods were less likely to become depressed.

To test the validity of their findings, they used statistical tools to remove the affects of several ‘confounding’ factors that may also be contributing to depression, including: age, gender, marital status, physical activity, smoking, education level, employment grade, and a host of other medical conditions. After adjusting for all of these, the findings still stood. A diet rich in whole foods seemed to protect against depression and a diet rich in processed foods seemed to increase the odds of depression.

These data are interesting because no other studies had really evaluated a ‘pro-depressive’ effect of processed foods. Many studies have shown benefit of individual nutrients, like omega-3s and B vitamin, but not really evaluated diet patterns as a whole.

For many people it’s kind of a no-brainer that the foods you eat can affect the way you feel. However, more studies like this one are needed to really make the link between different aspects of the diet and the risk of real depressive disorders, not just blue moods. The more we understand all the factors involved in contributing to depression and related disorders, the more we can do to effectively treat it.

Currently, psychiatrists, nurses and social workers all work together to help people deal with mental illnesses from different angles. Data is emerging, like this study, that suggests if we added nutritionists and exercise professionals into the mix, we could do an even better job.

Studies like this are the only way we can really solidify the science behind a broad treatment approach; and without the data insurance won’t cover it, and without insurance coverage the system won’t change. But do we need to wait for the system to change in order to live better today? No. Eat Well. Your brain will thank you.

Reference: Akbaraly et al., Dietary Pattern and Depressive Symptoms in Middle Age. The British Journal of Psychiatry (2009) 195:408-413.

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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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By Simon J. Evans, PhD

It’s been long known that social support is good for your health, and conversely, social isolation can put you at increased risk for many diseases. Having a good group of friends and family can protect from heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and generally leads to longer life.

Part of this is related to the ability to handle stress, having a shoulder to lean on and such. The ability to express your feelings to others has a calming effect on your nerves and actually helps your regulate the hormones that control your physical stress responses.

Part is also due to the tendency to take a little better care of yourself with others around. People who live alone aren’t as motivated to cook healthy meals for one. If you are married and your spouse (and maybe kids) have left town for a few days, you probably don’t eat quite as well as you do when they’re around. But this is only part of the story and there is much that we have yet to understand.

A new small study published in the September 2008 edition of Molecular Psychiatry adds some interesting insight. The study was done using mice. After all, mice are social animals as well, who live in groups referred to as a horde or mischief. The authors found that mice housed alone have a much more difficult time recovering from a heart attack than those housed with other mice.

Since, in this study, the mice were all fed the same thing and treated the same by the researchers, the only difference was their ability to interact with other mice. This controls for many of the differences in people’s lives that are impossible to control for in human studies.

The researchers looked at brains and stress levels (by hormone responses) of mice that were housed with four other mice or by themselves, following a non-fatal heart attack event. After the heart attack, the mice were resuscitated in much the same way we would be, by adrenal injections and mouse-sized CPR. They found that those that lived with other mice were much better off and were somewhat protected from the damaging effect of the heart attack.

The socially housed mice had far less brain damage (due to temporary loss of blood supply to the brain) and lower stress hormones after the heart attack than did those who had no social support. Interestingly, the part of the brain that these researchers looked at was the hippocampus, which we have discussed before as crucial for learning and memory. It is also one part that seems to degenerate during Alzheimer’s disease. So this research suggests that social support can help protect this crucial part of the brain from a serious environmental insult; in this case, a heart attack.

So when you’re visiting your family over the holiday season, be grateful for the support you have. Even though they may stress you out sometimes, you know that in times of need they would be there for you. This alone is a key factor in brain fitness.

Reference:
Molecular Psychiatry (2008) 13, 913-915.

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By Simon J. Evans, PhD

Not too long ago, scientists believed that adults couldn’t grow new neurons in their brain. However, work over the last several years has debunked this myth. We now know that adults continue to grow new neurons throughout life, a process called neurogenesis. Yes, new growth slows down after middle age but it continues. However, there are things you can do to help keep a higher rate of new brain cell birth, which we’ll get into in a minute.

Continuing to grow new brain cells can help in a couple of ways. First, cells are mostly born into a region called the hippocampus, which is crucial for learning and memory. Maintaining neurogenesis helps maintain memory function. Second, keeping those new neurons coming seems to help with depression. The hippocampus is also crucial for stress regulation and neurogenesis is a necessary part of the way anti-depressants work. So, new brain cell birth is important for cognitive and emotional functions. We have referred to these in the past as your IQ and your EQ.

It’s also been known for some time that exercise increase the rate of neurogenesis. Many studies show that lab animals who are allowed to exercise increase the rate of new neurons born into their hippocampus, relative to those animals that don’t get to exercise.

Although these studies are difficult to do in humans (for technical reasons) several studies suggest that the same thing is going on. In human trials that compare groups who exercise to control groups, the exercisers consistently show improved cognitive skills and increased function of specific brain areas, including the hippocampus.

A new study by Wu et al. published in the September 18th, 2008 edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology also shows that exercise may increase the connectivity of new neurons. It’s not enough to make new neurons. You also have to wire them up to other neurons to get them fully integrated into brain circuits so they can do their thing.

On average, every neuron in your brain makes about 10,000 connections. It’s no good if a neuron is just sitting there talking to itself. It must become part of a network to have real value. When you learn things, you actually increase the connectivity between neurons, and that’s what’s most important.

In fact, the number of connections in your brain is probably much more important than the number of brain cells when it comes to retaining cognitive function. The new study by Wu shows that exercise increases both. It increases the number of new neurons being born and the amount of branching that each new neuron forms.

Neurons are shaped kind of like trees. The more branches they have, the more connections they can make. In Wu’s study, exercise increased the number and length of branches on new neurons.

Finally, the most important part of the new study looked at how exercise affects the rate of new brain cell growth and amount of branching as we age. Essentially, the researchers confirmed that the rate of neurogenesis declines as we age and that exercising in early middle age has a large affect on boosting the rate of new brain cell birth. Exercising in older age also increases neurogenesis, although to a lesser degree.

However, here is the interesting part. In their experiments, the sedentary rats had about the same length of neuron branches in middle age and in old age. But the exercising rats had much longer branches. In fact, the old exercisers had longer neuron branches than the younger sedentary rats. This is great news since many studies show that branch length and connectivity may be a better indicator of cognitive health than the number of new neurons born.

We know that life-long learning is one way to promote more neuron branching and connectivity. Now this new study shows that exercising can also do this for older aged adult brains.

The bottom line: physical exercise is a great way to keep your brain fit.

Reference:
Journal of Applied Physiology (2008) 105:1585-1594

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By Simon J. Evans

The role of stress reduction is important to almost any health plan. Keeping your brain fit is no different. Constant stress, which plagues many in today’s society, causes an elevation of hormones, including cortisol, that can be bad for your health.

Now, let’s get something straight before we go any further. Cortisol is not some evil hormone that’s sole job is to make you fat and sick, as many late night infomercials would have you believe. It is a necessary part of your physiology and you would be dead without it. It is part of the flight, fight or fright response which helps you deal with immediate stressors and life-threatening situations. Even when you’re not stressed it plays important roles in vigilance and attention. Controlling cortisol levels with drugs is requires much caution.

Problems with cortisol occur when you stay stressed for long periods of time. The cortisol system is designed to turn on to help deal with stress and then turn off again when the stressor is passed. This can be psychological stress, like work, or physical stress, like a tiger attack. If you are constantly stressed and don’t turn it off, this can lead to problems with your immune system, weight regulation and, yes, brain function. Too much cortisol for too long can impair learning and memory.

OK, so cortisol is good if kept in check, but bad if it gets out of control.

So let’s get back to the title of this article. There is a lot of research in the psychology world showing that unhappy couples in negative relationships activate their stress systems much more frequently, which can eventually lead to poor health. This is probably fairly obvious. Arguments are stressful and we usually dwell on them for too long. Perhaps less obvious is that people in negative relationships are more prone to get stressed in other environment. Laboratory test show that people in negative relationships have an increased stress response to a social conflicts with anyone, not just their ball and chain.

The flipside of this was addressed in a new study published in October 2008 in Psychosomatic Medicine. Researchers looked at cortisol levels in middle age couples with young families to see if the quality of their intimate relationships affected their stress responses throughout the day. Previous studies show that good romantic relationships associate with longevity. Happy married couples, on average, live longer than unhappy couple or singles. In the new study, researchers wanted to know whether or not people in intimate relationships have lower cortisol and are less responsive to stressors from work.

Researchers equipped 51 couples with pocket computers that prompted them to answer some questions about what they had been doing to assess their exposure to stress and measure their levels of intimacy. They were also prompted to take saliva samples every three hours (except when sleeping) to test the level of cortisol, a measure of the level of activity of their stress system. This went on for six days in a row to ensure a good sampling. This is important because it’s the first study to get good measurements in everyday life, outside of the laboratory setting.

In the end, couples with higher levels of intimacy had lower cortisol throughout the day and decreased cortisol responses to stressful situations when they arose. In other words, people in positive relationships dealt much better with stress at the office (as measured by their hormonal response to stress) than those that had lower levels of intimacy in their home relationships. This provides another good reason to focus on balance in life. If you want to perform best at work, well, you know what you need to do at home . . .

Reference: Psychosomatic Medicine (2008) 70:883-889.

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