By Simon J. Evans, PhD

This week is Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is not just a time of year for stuffing our faces full of as much food as our stomachs can possibly tolerate before passing out in front of the football game on TV. Thanksgiving is really a time when we can reflect on what we have and give thanks.

Gratitude is actually a central component of all major religions and has been part of the human culture for millennia. However, most of us probably don’t practice the act of gratitude frequently enough. As Sheryl Crow says in her song, Soak up the Sun, “It’s not having what you want, It’s wanting what you’ve got”. Hopefully, we can all find some time this week to really consider what we have and be thankful for that.

Related to this, I was sitting in a class a few weeks ago on complementary and alternative medicine. We were talking about pain management and the speaker made a statement that will stick with me for a long time. She said “Suffering is wanting things to be different than they are”. I think she was right. It’s only when you are wanting things to somehow be different that you feel in the dumps.

It seems that this applies to physical and psychological pain. It seems then, that one way to alleviate suffering is to be grateful. When you focus on how good things are in certain areas of your life, it’s difficult to feel bad about other areas.

Everyone has certain problems that they would like to have resolved. But at the same time, everyone has certain blessings that they can count.

In the field of psychology, there’s a theory about how gratitude can actually help you build your arsenal of brain resources. This argument was laid out nicely by Barbara Frederickson in the book, The Psychology of Gratitude. Without going into the whole volume, she essentially says that positive emotions, including gratitude, can build and expand your mental resources to create a reserve that you can draw from when needed.

Negative emotions have easily measured intentions. Fear leads to the urge to escape, anger leads to the urge to attack, disgust leads to the urge to expel, etc. Positive emotions are a less easily measured. They don’t arise from survival situations, but in situations when things are going well, so the immediacy of reactions is not as cleanly linked to positive emotions.

Still, Dr. Fredrickson points out that gratitude, and other positive emotions, over time, lead to increased creativity, knowledge, resiliency, social integration and health. Plus, when you focus on positive emotions, it’s nearly impossible to experience negative emotions at the same time. If you make this a regular practice eventually your ‘default’ mood gets better and better - and this is one of the cruxes of brain fitness that we have focused on in the past.

So go ahead and indulge yourself this holiday season. But take some time to stop, reflect, and be thankful for what you have. It’s good for your brain.

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

by Simon J. Evans, PhD

There’s a rapidly emerging research field centered around ‘epigenetics’. Essentially, this is the ability to modify your genes during your life to change their level of activity. Genes, in and of themselves, are just blueprints. In order to use them you have to make the product that the genes code for. This requires ‘activating’ the gene so that it goes into production mode.

Epigenetics refers to the types of modifications we do to our genes that either crank up their productivity or dial it way down. The kicker is that these types of modifications can be heritable. Meaning, the way you modify genes during your life can be passed on to future generations. Also, the way your parents and grandparents modified their genes may have been passed on to you.

So far, we know that this applies to genes that control your eating behavior, fat storage, learning and memory, predisposition to drug addiction, and your circadian rhythms. Epigenetics have also been implicated in the risk for diseases such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and maybe even Alzheimer’s, so definitely fall into the realm of keeping your brain fit.

So how do we modify our genes? This is a hot area of research. We have made great strides in understanding of how our genes are modified at the biochemical level, but we are still only scratching the surface of understanding which behaviors or experiences cause these modifications.

However, current research does support the role for a few major lifestyle factors. First, what we decide to eat can have an effect on how our genes are modified. Certainly, pregnant women partially control the modification of their unborn’s genes through dietary choices. But there is also data suggesting men’s diets can control the epigenetic modifications of their future kids and even grandkids. Second, stress levels and trauma exposure are likely to be key factors in controlling epigenetic modifications.

Okay. So the way we choose to live our lives can modify our genes and we can pass those modifications on to our next generations. But what kinds of effects are we talking about?

Again, the field is young, but there are some interesting studies out there. A new study from Chang et al. at Rockefeller University published in the Journal of Neuroscience, used rodents to show that a mother’s diet during pregnancy continues to effect their offspring well after birth. Not too surprising, but here are some interesting details.

Moms who ate a high fat diet had babies, who, after birth, showed a preference for fat (over carbohydrates), ate more when allowed to eat freely, and showed an increase in many hormones that make you feel hungry. This included hormones released from the gut and those controlling feeding behavior at the level of your brain. Not surprisingly, these baby rats grew up to be fatter teens (they didn’t follow them into later adulthood) and had higher triglycerides and higher insulin. In humans, these types of changes can link to increased risk for diabetes, heart disease and depression.

To be clear, this study was solely about mom’s diet. There were control rats, who were genetically very similar, that ate a balanced diet and their pups did not have these problems. This means that the high fat diet that mom ate caused epigenetic changes in the pups that cranked up the production of genes the led to bad dietary choices in the pups, even after mom was out of the picture.

There are a few interesting studies in humans as well that suggest these types of effects apply to us as much as our lab rat friends. And it’s not just the mother’s diet that counts, although that probably has the biggest effect. Another study found that paternal grandfathers who suffered from a famine, had grandkids with a higher risk for diabetes.

So to answer the question posed in the title of this article, yes and no. You are probably stuck with the genes you’re born with, but how you choose to use those genes (and pass them on to your children) depends on how you choose to live. Even if you are past your reproductive years, the behaviors that you instill in your kids and grandkids can alter their genes and their future generations, so why not alter them for the better?

References:
The Journal of Neuroscience (2008), 28(46):11753-11759.
The Journal of Neuroscience (2008), 28(46):12107-12119.

by Simon J. Evans, PhD

Alzheimer’s is a debilitating disease where circuits in the brain literally get ‘tangled up’ and cause cognitive problems. Research into the causes and possible treatments for Alzheimer’s is intensive and beginning to provide rays of hope for families hit with this disorder.

The Triple Threat

One tool that researchers have used extensively is a mouse model, which is genetically destined to get Alzheimer’s disease due to three separate genes. There are several paths to Alzheimer’s, but having a gene that increases your risk for getting the disease does not guarantee you will get it. It still depends on many lifestyle factors, including your physical activity, nutrition and level of physical health. However, the Alzheimer’s mouse model, called the 3xTg-AD mouse, has the deck stacked against it with multiple genes increasing its risk and almost guaranteeing disease.

A couple of recent studies used these mice to look at the role of some specific dietary factors in helping or hurting the mice’s chances. The first study looked at low omega-3 to omega-6 ratios in the context of a low or high fat diet. The second study used vitamin B3 (nicotinamide) to try and counter some of the cognitive problems the mice develop as Alzheimer’s progresses.

Fish for Brains

Julien et al. from Lavel University in Quebec published a study in the Neurobiology of Aging, in which they reported a double whammy of low omega-3s and high fat that seems to make the genetically susceptible mice fair worse. Unfortunately, the diet they discovered as further increasing Alzheimer’s risk is not that different from what most westerners are eating.

Many folks in North America eat too much saturated fat and not enough good omega-3 fat from fish. When researchers gave this kind of diet to the Alzheimer’s mice, the brains of the mice had several increased markers of Alzheimer’s pathology. In teasing out the dietary problems, researchers found that either a high fat diet or a diet low in omega-3s, caused problems. When they combined the two, feeding low omega-3s in the context of a high fat diet, those problems compounded.

These data are consistent with previous observational studies in humans that show people who eat less omega-3s have increased rates of Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, studies have not shown success of using omega-3 supplementation to treat Alzheimer’s once it takes hold. However, there has been some success in treating early mild dementia. These studies, along with the new data from mice suggest that we should get plenty of omega-3s into our diet earlier to help drive down the risk of Alzheimer’s later.

Vitamin B3 gets an A

Still, there may be good news on the Horizon for those who are already heading down the Alzheimer’s road. Green et. al. from UC-Irvine published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience that demonstrated some remarkable effects of vitamin B3 at protecting the genetically prone mice from getting Alzheimer’s.

Now, before you rush out and start dosing up, realize this is a preliminary study that used whopping amounts of vitamin B3. Researchers fed mice at about 100 times the RDA and at about 10 times doses previously shown to cause some toxicity in humans. Still, the study is promising because it helps reveal some ways in which we might approach preventing Alzheimer’s disease in high-risk populations.

Researchers dosed up the 3xTg-AD mice with large amounts of nicotinamide, an active form of vitamin B3, in their drinking water. These mice performed as well as normal mice on many memory and other cognitive tests. Conversely, the Alzheimer’s prone mice that didn’t get the vitamin B3 showed the expected cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s.

Food Matters

The cool thing about both of these studies is that they open the door for more research using nutritional approaches to treat and prevent Alzheimer’s disease. It’s clear that genetics plays a role in some, but not all cases of dementia. But it’s also clear that we don’t have to accept our genetic predispositions in many cases. It is not fate. They way we choose to live our lives, including what we choose to eat, will play a large role in our cognitive future.

References:
Journal of Neuroscience (2008), 28(45): 11500-11510.
Neurobiology of Aging (2008), In Press.

by Simon J. Evans, PhD

In 2006, the total cost of health care in the United States was 2.1 trillion dollars, which is more than the gross national product of China. Yes, we spend more on healthcare than China spends on everything.

We’ve all heard that the war in Iraq costs the U.S. taxpayers about $10 billion per month, which is $120 billion annually. That means we are spending close to 20 times more on health care than we are on the war in Iraq. In fact, we spend more on healthcare than the entire defense budget. A big chunk of our taxes go to health care spending, and we’re not even doing a very good job at it given that 47 million Americans are still uninsured.

Here’s the real kicker, 70 to 80% of health care dollars are spent treating chronic preventable illness. Yes, preventable. If we all chose to live a little healthier, basically, eat better and exercise more, we could save so much money as a nation that we could afford to invade another country, maybe Canada.

The Obama - Biden administration is inheriting a lot of problems, including war and a financial crisis. As everyday citizens, it’s difficult to influence policies that will help remedy these situations. Not to mention that most of us (me included) would have no idea how to fix them anyway.

However, every one of us has significant control over our own health, which is the largest drain on our economy. So, can you lower your taxes by going for a walk - probably. According to a talk I attended recently by Emanuel Ezekiel, the Director of the NIH Bioethics Department and author of Health Care Guaranteed, approximately one third of most state taxes support healthcare. Not to mention the obvious burden on employers, which translates into reduced wages for employees.

So…what can we do to lower our taxes? Live with greater attention to our personal health.

If we choose to continue to ignore health issues, it may actually cost us significantly more. In 2011, Alabama will begin charging state workers who fall into the obese category an extra $25 for the health coverage. Since Alabama has one of the highest obesity rates in the country, with nearly 1 out of 3 folks packing on those kind of pounds, that’s going to sting. I don’t really agree with this approach and I think it will open up all kinds of legal challenges. However, the fact that one state is going down this road should be a wake-up call to us all.

The bottom line is that our health care crisis is getting out of control, but is largely within our control. Politicians spend big chunks of their time trying to figure out how to deliver more care to our citizens. But wouldn’t this attention be better spent trying to figure out how to stop so many people from getting sick in the first place? Maybe we should stop looking to the policy makers for answers and take our health into our own hands. Maybe it’s time for a little personal responsibility.

We will always have illness. Even if we did everything right, some folks would still get sick. That’s just the nature of our biology. But it seems to me that an 80% reduction in illness, which is what a better diet and more exercise could do, and which translates into a savings of about 1.6 trillion dollars a year, is a no-brainer.

By Paul R. Burghardt, PhD

Recently Bergman and colleagues, from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, reported that almost two-thirds of the people they interviewed for a recent study were meeting the minimum requirements for daily physical activity. Just to remind everyone that the current recommendations state that you either engage in: a) 30 minutes/day of moderate intensity 5 or more days of the week; or b) 30 minutes/day of high intensity physical activity for at least three days of the week. A very general guideline people can follow is that moderate exercise gets you breathing heavy enough that you can still talk but not sing. High intensity would make a conversation a little difficult. These are in line with the guidelines recently adopted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A great resource to look into this is the Exercise is Medicine website at www.exerciseismedicine.org.

Back to the research. Sixty-two percent of people in the study were accumulating 30 total minutes of moderate physical activity per day. Those are some pretty good numbers in terms of the proportion of people engaging in recommended physical activity. Remember, this was Sweden. Recent data from the US suggest that only about 30% of Americans reach those activity levels. But could, or should, something be improved?

Let’s do a little math…

For those of you that stuck around after dredging up visions of high school algebra, this should be worth your time. Consider the following. There are 48 possible thirty-minute time chunks in a 24 hour day, right? So, assuming we are sleeping 8 hours (16, thirty-minute time chunks), we still have 32 thirty-minute time chunks available during our waking hours. If people are engaging in the minimum activity they are hitting 1/32 of their total opportunities. Put another way, they are accumulating moderate levels of physical activity for 3.13% of the total awake time. I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer, but 3% doesn’t seem all that great.

Granted, this is the minimum amount of physical activity that has been found to have health benefits, but that also brings up a couple other disturbing issues. First, if engaging in physical activity for 3% of our waking hours each day is enough to lend benefit to our health, it makes you wonder what state of health most people are currently living in. We must be in pretty dire straits if such a small effort makes a real difference. Second, there are still over 1/3 of people in this study who did not meet the minimum recommendations…meaning throughout a 24-hour period they did not accumulate 30 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity.

Interestingly this study estimated overall activity throughout the day. Many previous studies have looked at leisure time physical activity, and the difference was immediately noticeable. First, higher education was associated with a lower level of physical activity. This is contradictory to previous reports, but highlights the difference between leisure and all-day activity. Basically, the researchers of this study suggest that lower education probably relates to more physically active jobs, and vice versa. Probably not a bad guess, but what is interesting is that there was such a discrepancy regarding physical activity when daily activity was included. This suggests for people with lower formal education do not engage in leisure time physical activity. More physical activity is great, but remember, especially for brain fitness, that you have to enjoy what you’re doing on some level. If you dig ditches for a living, but hate it, you may be very physically active, but apathetic or consistently frustrated; and that won’t do you any good. On the other hand, 30 minutes of leisure-time physical activity each day may go a lot farther for overall health, because it’s with a deliberate purpose. So this really begs the question of which type of activity (general activity vs. dedicated time for exercise) has better benefits on health. We’ll save this topic for an upcoming blog.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t bother to increase our physical activity whenever we can, I think that’s a great way to start. But there should be some consideration given to both the quality and quantity of activity.

Overall this study is encouraging in that such a substantial proportion of people are meeting and maintaining this minimal activity requirement (at least in Sweden). With that said, I think it’s time to raise the bar. But we’ll need to be ready, raising the bar will require awareness and commitment.

References:

BMC Public Health (2008) Oct 22;8:367.

US Health and Human Services: Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee Report (2008) p. D-3