The title question may be a bit of a stretch, but you only need to connect a couple of research dots to get from childhood obesity to reduced brain fitness in older age.

Belly Fat and Brain Fitness are Related

First, a recent meta-analysis from researchers at Johns Hopkins University verified that the odds of getting Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia increase as you gain weight. A meta analysis takes all previous studies on a particular topic and looks at them together to improve the statistical power over any one study by itself. This particular meta analysis looked at all studies that evaluated whether or not risk for Alzheimer’s or other types of dementia is increased in obese individuals.

Some studies evaluated obesity status of people in their mid-forties, others looked at people in their mid-sixties or seventies. In any case, obesity in mid-life or late life increased odds of getting Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias anywhere from 10 to 30 years later. Importantly, researchers controlled for socio-economic status, lifestyle choices, genetic factors and other illnesses so that the condition of obesity itself, seemed to be the culprit.

Adolescent Weight Problems Lead to Adult Weight Problems

The second dot to connect is that being overweight in childhood dramatically increases the odds of battling a weight problem throughout adulthood. So giving in to your kids’ demands for cakes, cookies and sugared cereals now, is not doing them any favors down the road.

There are really two ways to pack on the pounds. One is to make more fat cells, and the second is to store more fat in the fat cells you already have. An important study from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, discovered that the number of fat cells you will carry throughout your adult life is really set during your adolescent years. After the age of 20, your number of fat cells will stay about constant.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that your weight is set after age 20. You can still lose weight or dramatically gain weight. It’s not uncommon to gain weight in your 30s and 40s, as your activity level and metabolism slow down, especially if your food intake doesn’t change. You can always lose or gain fat in the cells that you already have. However, if you gain too much weight in adolescence, when you are actively making more fat cells, you are going to set yourself up for a tough battle for the rest of your life. So as parents, we should do everything possible to regulate our kids weight while it’s still somewhat in our control.

If you connect these two lines of research, you can see that increased weight gain in childhood predicts increased obesity in adulthood; and increased obesity in adulthood boosts your odds of Alzheimer’s and dementia in your 70s and 80s. There have not been any research studies following kids all the way from adolescence to old age to look directly at the relationship between childhood weight and dementia, but they will come eventually. Personally, I won’t be surprised if these studies find increased odds of dementia with childhood obesity.

It’s difficult to think of our kids as old people, but that is who they will become. We must think proactively and do everything we can to boost their odds of life-long cognitive success. If you have concerns about your own children’s weight, work with your pediatrician to design a diet and exercise program and get it under control while you still can. If you struggle with a weight problem yourself, don’t give up. The more effort you put in to bringing your weight under control, the better your odds of a fit brain down the road. Even if you only drop some of the weight you want to lose, every little bit helps boost those odds.

References:

Nature (2008) Jun, 453(7196):783-7

Obesity Reviews (2008) May, 9(3):204-18

By Simon J. Evans, PhD

Does your job have anything to do with your odds of getting Alzheimer’s disease down the road? Studies have come out recently linking intellectually challenging careers to reduced risk of dementia. Other studies link education level to cognitive health in later years. Overall, people with more education have lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease than those with less education.

This really isn’t that surprising if you think about it. We know that the more you use your brain, the stronger it gets. Just like muscles in your arms and legs, the brain gets more fit when you work it out. Higher education usually means more mentally stimulating jobs and that keeps your brain fit.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to go to graduate school to stay mentally active. Big studies look at large groups of people. On average, when you look at lots of people those with higher levels of education have more intellectually challenging jobs. So overall, they have lower rates of dementia. However, you can be a high-school drop out and still do what’s necessary to keep your brain fit. Just don’t be average.

You can maintain an active mind by committing yourself to life-long learning. It doesn’t take a formal education to teach yourself new skills, read new books and continually challenge your mind – it ain’t rocket science.

There is, however, a flip-side to this coin. Even though higher education predicts lower odds of getting Alzheimer’s disease, those with higher education who do get Alzheimer’s, decline much more rapidly and die sooner than those with less education. Remember, again, this is based on big number averages and is not necessarily predictive for any one person. Still, on average if you have an intellectually challenging career, your odds of getting dementia are lower, but if you do get it, your odds of rapid decline are greater.

At first, this might seem paradoxical. But I think there is a likely explanation for these seemingly odd data. It all relates back to the cognitive reserve theory, which we have discussed in the past.

Essentially, cognitive reserve is something you create throughout your life. The more you learn and the more you experience, the more you create cognitive reserve. This is like ‘extra’ brain circuits to accomplish intellectual tasks.

Think of it like a city building multiple bridges across a river. If you only have one bridge to cross the river and it gets knocked out by a freak storm, you can’t get traffic to the other side. If, however, you’ve created reserve routes to cross the river with multiple bridges and one gets knocked out, you can divert traffic across the other bridges.

This is the same with brain circuits. If you’ve created multiple circuits through a variety of experiences you have different ways to accomplish the same task. If one takes a hit due to age-related damage, you can divert thoughts through different circuits and not really notice a problem.

So people with higher education and more challenging jobs may have reserve brain circuits. That means that even though we may all experience the same age-related damage, someone with more cognitive reserve will show less cognitive decline. There are also ways to minimize the age-related damage through healthy living, but that’s another topic.

So why would people with more reserve show more rapid decline once dementia sets in? Again, this makes sense if you think about it. People with high levels of reserve who get dementia must have experienced severe damage that took out all their bridges. Damage of this severity will take them down quickly.

However, it’s an illusion. Since studies only compare people diagnosed with dementia, they may be comparing apples to oranges. On average, the people with high reserve (mentally challenging careers in these studies) who have Alzheimer’s disease have likely experienced a lot more damage than, on average, the people with low reserve who have Alzheimer’s.

This would explain why people with more challenging careers would have fewer cases of Alzheimer’s; and also why people with higher levels of education who do get Alzheimer’s, decline much more quickly.

Overall, it’s better to boost your odds of not getting dementia in the first place by doing what’s necessary to challenge your mind on a daily basis. Commit yourself to life-long learning and stay mentally active to build more bridges. Couple this with quality nutrition, plenty of exercise and enough sleep, and you will also minimize the storms that create the damage that can damage your bridges.

Many of us have a sweet tooth. It’s hardwired into our brains. Several thousand years ago, when we went long periods of time between meals, we needed to get all the calories we could whenever we had the chance. Sweet and fatty foods are high in calories, so our brains made them taste good to get us to eat them. It was a survival instinct back then that made for fit brains. It doesn’t work so well for us now.

Taste Isn’t Everything

We’ve known this for some time. We know that when you eat something sweet you light up pleasure centers, driven by dopamine, in your brain. New research shows it’s not just the sweet flavor that pleasures us. We will light up pleasure centers even if we can’t taste the sweet foods. The high sugar content of sweet foods cranks up our insulin. It turns out that the insulin spike is enough to activate our pleasure centers.

In a recent study, researchers knocked out the ability of mice to taste sweetness. They proved it by allowing mice to choose between plain water and water spiked with sucralose (a non-digestible sugar with no available calories). Normal mice will prefer the sucrolose water because it’s sweet, but these mice couldn’t tell the difference. Next, the researchers gave the un-sweetened mice a choice between plain water and sugar water, and they those the sugar water, even though they couldn’t taste the difference.

In the same studies, the researchers looked at the pleasure centers in the brains of the mice. Sucralose water (sweet but no calories) had no affect, but sucrose water (regular sugar) cranked up the dopamine in please circuits, whereas in regular mice, both sucrolose and sucrose activate pleasure. This showed that the high calorie content alone was enough to activate pleasure, even in the absence of taste.

Sweet Pleasures, or Not

So what does this mean for us sweet-toothed humans? First, since our pleasure circuitry is similar, it’s likely that the same thing happens in our brains (although this remains to be tested directly). Second, we’ve discussed in the past how high glycemic foods (simple carbohydrate, high sugar) spike your blood sugar and insulin levels. This is likely tickling your pleasure centers and reinforcing high glycemic eating. The problem is that this type of eating is gaining more and more data on increasing your risk for metabolic and cognitive diseases, like diabetes and dementia.

Like anything that stimulates your brain pleasure circuits, it becomes less intense over time. So the more you eat high glycemic foods, the less intensely your pleasure centers are likely to respond. This is also how drug addiction works, and is why people need more of a drug to get the same high over time. Not only that, but when you come off the drug your pleasure centers crash to really low activation and you feel horrible. Similarly, when you try to improve your diet to reduce low glycemic foods you are not getting that pleasure boost so you crave sugar.

Now, to be clear, drugs of abuse and high glycemic foods operate at completely different levels. In the words of Nigel from Spinal Tap, drugs turn your volume up to 11, while high glycemic foods probably crank it up to 3 or 4. But the principle is the same.

It’s Never Too Late to Change

The human brain is an amazingly adaptive thing. Even though it’s wired to enjoy sweet and fatty foods, we can modify and retrain those brain circuits to adapt to health in today’s environment. After all, our brains weren’t designed to be pleasured by sweet foods on a daily basis as is the case today.

Fortunately, you can reset your dopamine scale with a focus on low glycemic eating. It takes a week or two of strictly removing excess sugar from your diet, but you can reset the circuits and lose the bulk of your cravings for sweet foods. Furthermore, if you replace the pleasure activating foods with active healthy behaviors that you enjoy, like playing tennis or shooting hoops, you’ll have a much greater chance of success.

Reference: de Araujo, Neuron 57 (2008), 930–941.

If you talked to a person from the 1950s about all the modern marvels we have today they’d likely drool at the mouth. What? You don’t have to get up to change the TV channel? You can reheat leftovers in 1 minute? You can access any information at any time without leaving your house? No way!

Be Careful What You Ask For

But are our lives really getting any easier? Do all these time saving devices allow us to work less? Well, sort of. It certainly takes less work to do any specific task. When I was in graduate school writing my thesis, I thought of the poor slobs who had to do that without the aid of a computer or the internet. It must have taken people an entire day to go to the library to find references that I can now get in 10 minutes (God bless Google). The trade-off is that we are expected to do a lot more tasks as part of our normal day.

I was reading an interesting paper by Kelly Lambert recently that put some of this into perspective as it may relate to rates of depression in our modern society. Even with all our modern conveniences, high-end medical care and plethora of designer drugs, we have a huge mental health crisis. In fact, today mental health accounts for about 15% of disease burden worldwide. So why are we so unhappy?

The Thrill is in the Chase

Dr. Lambert argues that one factor in our overall societal unhappiness is the fact that we have it too easy, especially when it comes to feeding ourselves. Years gone by, dinner was more than a phone-call away. We actually had to track our food across the tundra and risk death by saber-toothed tigers or violent weather, in order to feed ourselves. Even if we were successful, we had to do it again the next day. As time drew on, we learned it was much easier to plant food in the ground. But this still required intensive labor and patience to bring our sowing efforts to the fruition of harvest.

All of this effort made the reward that much more enjoyable. The magnitude of the reward may actually depend on the magnitude of the effort required to achieve it. Meaning the harder we have to work for something, the more we enjoy it when we are successful. Since successfully finding food is a major factor in our survival, and we used to work very hard to stay fed, we had ample opportunity for regular high intensity rewards.

Appreciate What You Have

Today, however, we take for granted this major facet of our lives. Finding food does not require much effort at all, at least for most of the lucky people living in our society. Because we don’t need to put out effort, we don’t activate reward centers in our brains that our ancestors activated on a regular basis. We are essentially robbing ourselves of a major ‘happiness factor’, and this, argues Dr. Lambert, may be a problem. It may be that today’s lack of regular reward, due to lack of necessary effort, may be a factor in high rates of depression.

Whether or not she is right, I don’t know. She provides many examples and scientific studies to back up her argument and I thought it was a very interesting point worthy of a post. In fact, I have two cats that seem to agree with her. They are not content just eating their chow out of a dish. Instead, they enjoy scooping out one nugget at a time, batting it across the kitchen floor and then pouncing on their prey before eating it.

There’s not really much we can do about this unless you want to pull a Grizzly Adams and drop out of society, move to the hills and live off the land. Alternatively, you could do all your grocery shopping in full camouflage, crawling around on your belly through the frozen food aisle, stalking fish sticks. Or, maybe we can be more appreciative of what we have and not take all our modern conveniences for granted.

Reference: Lambert, K.G. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30 (2006) 497–510

By Dr. Simon Evans and Dr. Paul Burghardt

For some time now, we’ve been promoting the role of a healthy lifestyle in maintaining brain fitness. Another new study lends more support, but before we get into that we thought we’d focus on some common-sense topics as to why this is true.

One simple concept to understand that doesn’t require a PhD is the fact that any organ in your body, including your brain, needs a healthy blood supply to access nutrients and oxygen. This is one reason why heart disease and mental health problems, including dementia are so often related. If you tied a tourniquet around your leg to cut-off the blood supply, you shouldn’t be surprised when your foot stops working to well.

The same is true for your brain. If you continue to do things that are bad for your cardiovascular system, like sit around all day and eat chips, your vascular system will eventually have a problem, and this is not good news for your brain. In fact, your brain uses about 20% of the oxygen that you breathe and the calories that you eat. Your blood supply is responsible to get that stuff to the right place in order to keep your brain in good working operation.

The benefits of life-long learning and continually challenging your mind to keep it sharp are well established. But if you don’t couple that effort with doing what’s necessary to maintain a healthy neurovascular system, you cannot fully realize the benefit. You may have read a lot about neurogenesis and synaptogenesis, which is the constant rewiring of your brain that occurs when you stay mentally active and helps to keep your mind agile. However, this process can only work well if the blood vessels near all this rewiring are healthy enough to do their job. Otherwise, where is the energy, nutrients and oxygen necessary for the remodeling job going to come from?

Think of neurogenesis as a new housing subdivision going into an existing community and the roads as the blood supply to service the houses. If you were the builder constructing this new development you wouldn’t get very far if you didn’t first attend to the new roads. Not only are the roads needed for the new owners to get in and out of their homes; but they are needed for delivering all the lumber and concrete, enabling the different crews to come in and construct the new houses, and take all the trash away. Similarly, new brain cells or new brain cell connections need healthy roads (neurovascular system) to work right.

Related to this, a recent large study, just unveiled this month (April 2008) by Dr. Thomas Montine from the University of Washington, reports that 33% of the risk of dementia stems from disease of small blood-vessels in the brain. In this 12-year study, 3,400 men and women over age 65 volunteered for periodic cognitive testing and a brain autopsy upon their death. In the 221 autopsies performed, researchers discovered that small blood vessel disease accounted for about 1/3 of the risk for dementia. Importantly, this type of small blood vessel disease may go unnoticed for some time. We’re not talking about big events like a stroke or blood clot blocking a large vessel. However over time these small problems can add up, and result in cognitive impairment.

Admittedly, this study comes from the Pacific Northwest, the origin of grunge-rock and Starbucks coffee. We can’t be sure that all these people aren’t suffering from some kind of post-angst cognitive disorder, or a latent flannel shirt allergy! We also can’t rule out suffering from some sort of post-tramautic stress after invading the world with high-priced coffee, equivalent to about $18.00 per gallon; slightly more than we’re currently paying for gas. In fact, one of us (Evans) was raised in Seattle and may be showing some early symptomology.

However, with these potential confounds aside (unless Austin Powers was right, and during the time that Dr. Evil was cryogenically preserved his faithful cronies invested heavily in Starbucks), this study is an incredibly important step that illustrates the diversity of factors that can lead to dementia. Even more importantly, it suggests that you can substantially decrease your odds of developing dementia by attending to life-style factors that can protect against vascular disease.

The beauty is that we have a good idea of how to do this since blood vessels serve to supply active areas of the body with nutrients! So if your brain is active (which requires energy), and you’re maintaining your overall vascular health by eating right and exercising, odds are that you will be greatly reducing your risk of developing dementia from small vessel disease. Now it should be noted that research is ongoing on this subject, but common sense would suggest that this will hold true.

Taken together this highlights some very important reasons as to why exercise and nutrition play such a crucial role in brain fitness. Attending to both of these lifestyle factors is necessary to maintain a healthy blood supply and the creation of new blood vessels, in order to feed new brain circuits established by learning and mental activity. If you neglect this aspect of brain fitness, you may literally limit your ability to benefit from neurogenesis and synaptogenesis induced by many of the ‘brain-training’ programs designed to keep your mind young.

A recent paper in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory by Bernward Winter and colleagues investigated the effects of a single session of exercise of different intensities on individuals’ ability to learn and remember new words.

College students were asked to sit quietly for 15 minutes, walk at a moderate pace for 40 minutes, or sprint two times for three minutes per sprint. Fifteen minutes after finishing one of those intensities of exercise, they learned a pairing between a made up word and a picture (e.g. glump/ picture of a car). The subjects were rated on the speed at which they learned the new pairings, and their accuracy when recalling the pairings between pictures and novel words one week and eight months after the single exercise session.

For the record, my money was on the moderate intensity group to perform the best, but……the high-intensity group learned the pairings 20% faster than both the control and moderate intensity exercise groups. Translated that means that after two sprints of less than three minutes each increased peoples’ speed of learning by 20% compared to the other conditions. And that, folks, is the reason why I am not a gambler.

Another interesting finding was that after intense exercise, the students not only learned faster, but recalled those word-picture pairings more accurately after 1-week and 8-months. So do some sprints….you’ll learn it quicker, and remember it longer!

Along with the learning component, this group of researchers also examined levels of hormones in the blood for potential association with peoples’ ability to learn in the word-picture paring task.

Levels of the growth factor BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor) and other hormones involved in our flight-or-fight response were elevated after sprinting. Further, these hormones were associated with better short-term and long-term learning success. This indicates that enhanced learning after this intense, but brief, exercise may be modulated by these hormones.

One of the main questions to ask is whether this type of exercise would produce the same learning effects in non-athletes? Since the subjects of this study were athletic to begin with, their perception of intense exercise is likely to be much different than that of an individual who rarely or never exercises but decides to go out and does some sprints. In fact, this study showed a subtle association between increased mood after intense exercise and overall greater success in learning. What I’m trying to say is that these people probably felt pretty good, amped-up (so to speak) after the sprints. It’s possible that a positive emotional spin on the situation enhanced learning.

We know that the emotional value of a situation influences how strongly a memory is stored, and this happens at both ends of the spectrum. Very happy events often stick in our memories. Unfortunately very unhappy events also stick in our memories, and can cause a lot of problems, for example post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Now I don’t think that an out-of-shape individual would suffer PTSD from doing a couple of sprints (unless the sprints caused an asthma or heart attack). However, for someone that really enjoys exercise and is familiar with exercise this may have been just enough of a “rush” to make learning a little easier and more memorable.

Another important point to highlight is that this study was specifically looking at the effect of one session of exercise. There are numerous studies indicating that increasing moderate physical activity as a part of one’s daily life has positive benefits on learning and cognition. So don’t feel like you need to start incorporating sprint work into your daily routine to enhance learning. The intriguing thing about this current study is that it provides another way to try and enhance learning, and also starts to address issue of when to learn new things after you have exercised.

Although there is some obvious follow-up that needs to occur after this study, this is a very nice experiment that illustrates the critical issue of timing in maximizing one’s efforts.

The old cliché “timing is everything” should be looked upon as a tried-and-true adage. Much of our biology works on a daily rhythm. Along with that, our bodies respond to environmental ‘pressures’ (eating, exercise, temperature, interacting with other people, etc.) with a variety of finite behavioral, and biological responses. Basically, when our current state of living is interrupted by some environmental (outside) factor, we will respond until those factors are neutralized.

This paper illustrates how we could capitalize on some of that compensatory biology to do a little multitasking. Get some quick exercise in, and while you’re recovering teach yourself a new language. I’m not saying this approach will work for everyone, or for every type of learning, but the possibilities are there; and the combinations will be virtually endless.

Do you have a sweet tooth in the morning? Do you crave that bowl of high-sugar cereal or a donut with your coffee? We all know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and getting something for breakfast is likely better than getting nothing at all. However, a new study from a group in Australia tells us that if you must eat those sweet, high carbohydrate foods, you would do much better putting them off until lunch and grabbing some more protein in the morning.

A g’zillion different studies show us why it is so important to eat a morning meal. Breakfast eaters have an easier time controlling their weight, better energy throughout the day and higher performance on the job or at school. We also know that foods with a lower glycemic index (meaning they are less likely to spike your blood sugar because they have less simple carbohydrates) are better than high glycemic breakfasts for all this stuff.

A new study took this logic a step further and asked what would happen to your blood sugar if you spread out all your carbohydrates evenly throughout the day, or, conversely, loaded most of them up at breakfast, lunch or dinner. Researchers expected that the peak in blood sugar would be highest right after eating the high carbohydrate meal. In a sense, they were right, but with one big surprise.

A high carbohydrate breakfast meal caused a much bigger spike in blood sugar than a similar meal at lunch or dinner. It appears that our bodies can tolerate a dose of carbs much better in the afternoon or the evening, than we can in the morning. This study utilized type II diabetics to provide and exaggerated normal blood-sugar response, but presumably, this applies to everyone.

Why is this important and what does it have to do with the brain? Your body needs to control its blood sugar (glucose) in a tight window in order for all your systems to operate at their best. Importantly, your brain uses glucose exclusively as an energy source, whereas the rest of your body can tap into energy from fats and proteins. So giving your brain a steady supply of glucose is important for optimal brain function.

If you are constantly eating a big chunk of your daily carbs at breakfast (by scarfing down the donuts, pancakes, French toast or high sugar cereals), then you are probably spiking your blood sugar fairly high in the morning on a regular basis.

This has a couple of problems. First, in the short run, spiking your blood sugar causes your body to respond by releasing insulin to crash it back down. This will cause a drop in energy levels during the mid-morning hours, which is a time when many folks need to be on their toes at work, and kids need to be attentive in school. Second, in the long run, constantly spiking your blood sugar can eventually lead to insulin resistance and type II diabetes, which increases your odds for heart disease and cognitive problems as well.

Obviously it’s best to get rid of the high sugar foods from your diet completely, but let’s be reasonable. Most people, me included, enjoy a fresh-baked cinnamon roll every now and then and we aren’t willing to deprive ourselves of all of life’s pleasures.

So here’s the solution – just don’t eat this stuff for breakfast. It’s the worst possible time of day for these kinds of foods. Unfortunately, these are the common breakfast foods that we feed our kids on a regular basis and find littering the morning menu of our favorite restaurants.

Still, try to switch to higher protein meals in the morning, like eggs or a quick breakfast shake and you will likely notice an increase in energy throughout the morning and the rest of the day. If you just can’t go cold-turkey on the morning office donuts, grab one to stick in your desk and eat it with lunch instead (just keep it to a minimum).

Reference: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2008) 87:638-44

So you’ve done all the right things to enhance your brain’s function. You’ve modified your diet to optimize the raw materials needed by your brain. You’ve adopted healthy habits of mental and physical exercises to keep your brain in top shape.

But what have you done to ensure that the messages being generated in the brain are effectively transmitted throughout your body?

After all, your brain controls and regulates every function in your body from respiration and circulation to digestion and motion - to name just a few. In fact, every tissue and organ in your body is completely dependent on the messages coming down from your brain to know how to function on a moment-by-moment basis. And the demands change every moment you’re alive. Are you running or are you sitting? Did you just eat a meal or are you hungry? Are you hot or are you cold? Your body must adapt and modify to its environment continuously. And what is coordinating all this function in your body? None other than your brain!

Then should you be keeping your brain in tiptop shape? Absolutely! But could you be undermining all the good things you are doing for your brain by neglecting a critical area of the body that affects how these messages are transmitted? Very possibly!

To find the area of concern we need to first trace a nerve’s pathway. The vast majority of all nerve connections happen in the brain. From the brain, nerves travel down out of the skull and through the middle of your bony spine as part of the spinal cord. At some point the nerve branches away from the cord, passes between two bones and travels to the tissue or organ that it controls.

The most critical and vulnerable area of the nervous system is the junction between the spine and the skull as it passes through the first cervical vertebrae or atlas bone.

The atlas bone is particularly susceptible to misalignment due to its design and the task it is given to perform. The atlas bone has the fewest overlapping bony structures to help in maintaining it’s proper alignment compared to all other vertebrae in the human spine. Thus the atlas bone relies strictly on muscles and other soft tissue to maintain its alignment. Additionally, the weight of the head is equivalent to an average size bowling ball. The atlas is attempting to keep this very heavy object of yours balanced upright. This task becomes very difficult to achieve when the head is moved too rapidly, such as during a fall from a height, an auto accident, or a sporting or recreational accident. Research has shown that the muscles of the neck are incapable of controlling the weight of the head in these situations and misalignment will result. Chiropractors refer to these misalignments as subluxations.

When subluxation occurs in the spine, irritation and pressure on the nerves passing through or between the involved bones results. The irritated nerve is no longer able to pass information efficiently and effectively and improper function occurs and health problems result. Subluxations have been shown to cause a wide range of health problems such as:

• neck pain
• back pain
• numbness
• digestive problems
• immune problems
• migraine headaches.
• allergies & congestion

Subluxations at atlas are particularly concerning. When we consider that 90% of the nerves traveling down from the brain pass through atlas we understand that a subluxation at this level can affect virtually every nerve in the entire body and can play a large role in many of the health problems one may experience.

Additionally, when atlas is subluxated the entire body must contort and distort to keep you upright. To understand what happens to the spine when atlas subluxates, try holding a bowling ball with you hand upright in front of you with your forearm straight up and down. Then bend your wrist slightly so the bowling ball is leaning to one side without changing the position of your forearm (this will be simulating an atlas subluxation). Notice the affect it has on the position of your entire body as you try and keep from falling over (or dropping the bowling ball!). Roger Sperry, a 1980 Nobel Prize winning scientist in brain research, best captures the impact of the distortions on the body in the following statement:

“Better than 90% of the energy output of the brain is used in relating the physical body in its gravitational field. The more mechanically distorted a person is, the less energy available for thinking, metabolism and healing.”

So regardless of how many good things you are doing to keep your brain in shape you may be undermining all this beneficial effort due to a subluxation at atlas.

So what can you do to avoid subluxation from occurring at atlas? What can you do to keep your spine from getting on your nerves? There are some healthy habits you can adopt to keep your self out of trouble. First of all buy yourself a headset for both your home phone and your cell phone. Bending your head over as you try to cradle the phone between your head and shoulder has been shown to cause subluxation. Sleeping on your stomach should also be avoided. Having your head twisted as you sleep on your stomach is extremely bad for your spine and has been shown to cause subluxation as well. Lifting something from the ground using your legs with your back straight up and down is tried and true advice you’ve probably heard before, but bears repeating. You should also always avoid using your head to raise or turn your body. Additionally, you might begin an activity that strengthens and tones the intrinsic muscles that hold the spine in place. Activities like yoga and pilates are especially beneficial for achieving this.

Finally, if you have had some type of unfortunate accident and believe that you might have an atlas subluxation or are experiencing some of the symptoms of an atlas subluxation, you should be evaluated by an upper cervical specialist. Some of the most common symptoms of an atlas subluxation are:

• neck pain
• headaches
• restrictions in the normal motion of your neck
• popping or grinding sounds during neck motion
• migraines

There are several good resources for finding a good specialist near you. Two of the best ones are www.upcspine.com & www.uppercervical.org.

About the author: Dr. Rob Borer is an upper cervical specialist. He has been in private practice for the past 8 years with his wife Dr. Sherri Borer. Dr. Rob has delivered over 30,000 upper cervical atlas corrections and regularly speaks on the detrimental effects an atlas subluxation has on ones health. For more information about Drs. Rob & Sherri Borer they welcomes you to visit www.borerchiro.com.

A couple of recent articles in the journal Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health, reported exercise as an effective adjunctive treatment for individuals suffering from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).

An Italian research group [Pilu et al, 2007] reported that individuals receiving antidepressant drugs along with cardiovascular (aerobic) exercise for eight months had decreased severity of depression compared to individuals receiving drugs but not exercise. A follow up analyses of the study determined that these individuals’ perception of their quality of life was also improved [Carta et al, 2008].

One of the interesting things about this study is that the researchers specifically chose women who were not responding to drug treatment. But when drug treatment was coupled with exercise they felt better! Pretty cool.

Lack of response to antidepressant drug treatment is a pretty sizeable problem. Many times individuals will be placed on different drugs, sometimes combinations of drugs, or varying doses of drug, until something seems to work. This can be unpleasant due to the side effects of antidepressant drugs, and relative amount of time it may take to find the appropriate drug and dose.

So the potential for exercise to increase the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs is an important finding that will hopefully be incorporated at the clinical level.

There are a couple of limitations to the study that the authors acknowledge. First, only a small number of participants were included. Generally, results from studies with larger numbers of participants have more statistical power. That means that researchers can more confidently attribute the results to the treatment, and not just random chance.

Second, the study only included women within in a specific age range (40-60 years old). The problem here is that the findings might not apply to a different demographic, say 18-25 year old males. On the positive side, it does suggest a benefit in that age group of women which is of interest since the rates of depression our about twice as high in women compared to men.

Third, they didn’t have the full set of control groups. Since the exercise sessions were conducted as a group, it may be that the social interaction among the participants during the exercise period is what caused the improvements in depressive symptoms. However, several prior studies also suggest anti-depressive effects of exercise. Still, the authors can’t say for sure that these effects were due to exercise, and not the social aspects of coming together to exercise in a group.

But if we step back and look at the big picture, it doesn’t really matter if it is “just” the exercise that reduces depressive symptoms. These women felt less depressed and that they had a better life! So if we feel the need to be scientifically cautious about these findings….. for now, get together with some other people to exercise.

Again, this was a small study that didn’t have the full array of scientific comparison groups, but this is another option for people suffering from depression who are not responsive to their medications. You may be wondering, did these women even need the drugs? Great question! We’ll talk about that in an upcoming post.

By Paul R. Burghardt, PhD

A recent issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (volume 7, 2008) painted an interesting portrait of the current state of drug approval by the FDA. The editorial, responding to an article by Bethan Hughes in the same issue, reported that in 2007 a total of 19 requests (17 new drugs and 2 license applications for existing drugs) were approved by the FDA; making it the LOWEST year for novel drug approvals since 1983.

There are several potential arguments to why this has happened, which the editorial and article touch upon. These include lack of novel science, insufficient funding, overregulation, understaffing, and bureaucracy. But aside from the intricacies of why there were only 19 approvals issued by the FDA in 2007, the fact remains that there were only 19 approvals issued by the FDA in 2007.

So with the veritable trickle of drug approval over the past couple years (hence the “drip”) a couple questions immediately come to mind. Should you wait for the new drug to treat your ailment? If so, what drug is it that you are waiting for?

Here’s what I think. Whatever the cause of declining numbers of approved drugs, it graphically illustrates the delicacy of a system. A very important system set in place to protect the public by both producing novel therapies while ensuring that those therapies are not harmful. This process that takes time. First, to find a treatment that is effective. Second, to ensure that said treatment doesn’t screw up the rest of our biology. Not a trivial task! But ultimately, this is a system that profoundly affects individuals’ health (for better or worse) as well as the well-being of their loved ones.

Can you afford to wait?

Making smart lifestyle choices that promote overall health is something that is completely within your control. Not only on what you choose to do, but when you choose to start.

The take home message is that there has never been a good reason to wait around for a drug to improve our health. For one, a drug that effectively treats your problem may not be developed for some time, if ever. If there is a drug that looks promising for you, it still takes time to get through the approval process (for good reason . . . safety). There are many choices we can make on a daily basis to improve our health. And although it is never too late to start, the sooner you start the better your odds of avoiding a problem in the long run.

This is particularly important to keep in mind when thinking about brain health. The complexity of our brains has been said to rival, and probably surpass, the complexity of the Universe. Remember that we’re talking about an organ that can think about, how it (the brain) is thinking about how complex the Universe is. So it’s a bit of a stretch to assume that any drug will be able to solve all the problems related to mental or cognitive disorder. A drug may help alleviate a specific problem/symptom, but it won’t fix the underlying cause.

The question you should have been asking yourself about any drug is “do the benefits outweigh the side-effects?” Now, that question comes along with the caveats “when will it be developed,” and “what if it’s never developed?”

If you want control of your health, take it.