Chocolate Helps Prevent Stroke
February 15, 2010
Telegraph
By Richard Alleyne
A study of nearly 50,000 people found that those eating chocolate were 22 per cent less likely to suffer a stroke than those that didn’t.
And those who did suffer a stroke but had indulged in chocolate were 46 per cent less likely to die as a result.
The reason is believed to be that the food is rich in flavanoids, a healthy anti-oxidant, although researchers at the University of Toronto are keen to carry out extra studies.
Sarah Sahib, the study author of the University of Toronto in Canada, said: “More research is needed to determine whether chocolate truly lowers stroke risk, or whether healthier people are simply more likely to eat chocolate than others.”
She worked alongside colleague Dr Gustavo Saposnik and they found that 44,489 people who ate one serving of chocolate per week were 22 per cent less likely to have a stroke than people who ate no chocolate.
A second study found that 1,169 people who ate 50 grams of chocolate once a week were 46 percent less likely to die following a stroke than people who did not eat chocolate.
The researchers found only one additional relevant study in their search of all the available research. That study found no link between eating chocolate and risk of stroke or death.
However, Dr Saposnik warned: “Eating too much chocolate can make you fat as chocolate also contains saturated fats.
“Further investigation needs to be done. We need to study specific chocolate consumption.”
The findings are due to be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto.
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Reclassifying Mental Disorders
February 15, 2010
The New York Times
By Benedict Carey
Far fewer children would get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “Binge eating disorder” and “hypersexuality” might become part of the everyday language. And the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated would be sharply revised. These are a few of the changes proposed on Tuesday by doctors charged with revising psychiatry’s encyclopedia of mental disorders, the guidebook that largely determines where society draws the line between normal and not normal, between eccentricity and illness, between self-indulgence and self-destruction — and, by extension, when and how patients should be treated.
The eagerly awaited revisions — to be published, if adopted, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due in 2013 — would be the first in a decade.
For months they have been the subject of intense speculation and lobbying by advocacy groups, and some proposed changes have already been widely discussed — including folding the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome into a broader category, autism spectrum disorder.
But others, including a proposed alternative for bipolar disorder in many children, were unveiled on Tuesday. Experts said the recommendations, posted online at DSM5.org for public comment, could bring rapid change in several areas.
“Anything you put in that book, any little change you make, has huge implications not only for psychiatry but for pharmaceutical marketing, research, for the legal system, for who’s considered to be normal or not, for who’s considered disabled,” said Dr. Michael First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who edited the fourth edition of the manual but is not involved in the fifth.
“And it has huge implications for stigma,” Dr. First continued, “because the more disorders you put in, the more people get labels, and the higher the risk that some get inappropriate treatment.”
One significant change would be adding a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, a recommendation that grew out of recent findings that many wildly aggressive, irritable children who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not have it.
The misdiagnosis led many children to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes.
“The treatment of bipolar disorder is meds first, meds second and meds third,” said Dr. Jack McClellan, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington who is not working on the manual. “Whereas if these kids have a behavior disorder, then behavioral treatment should be considered the primary treatment.”
Some diagnoses of bipolar disorder have been in children as young as 2, and there have been widespread reports that doctors promoting the diagnosis received consulting and speaking fees from the makers of the drugs.
In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist at Columbia, said he and his colleagues on the panel working on the manual “wanted to come up with a diagnosis that captures the behavioral disturbance and mood upset, and hope the people contemplating a diagnosis of bipolar for these patients would think again.”
Experts gave the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the manual, predictably mixed reviews. Some were relieved that the task force working on the manual — which includes neurologists and psychologists as well as psychiatrists — had revised the previous version rather than trying to rewrite it.
Others criticized the authors, saying many diagnoses in the manual would still lack a rigorous scientific basis.
The good news, said Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry who has been critical of the manual, is that most patients will be spared the confusion of a changed diagnosis. But “the bad news,” he added, “is that the scientific status of the main diseases in previous editions of the D.S.M. — the keystones of the vault of psychiatry — is fragile.”
To more completely characterize all patients, the authors propose using measures of severity, from mild to severe, and ratings of symptoms, like anxiety, that are found as often with personality disorders as with depression.
“In the current version of the manual, people either meet the threshold by having a certain number of symptoms, or they don’t,” said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, the psychiatric association’s research director and, with Dr. David J. Kupfer of the University of Pittsburgh, the co-chairman of the task force. “But often that doesn’t fit reality. Someone with schizophrenia might have symptoms of insomnia, of anxiety; these aren’t the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, but they affect the patient’s life, and we’d like to have a standard way of measuring them.”
In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. Regier, Dr. Kupfer and several other members of the task force outlined their favored revisions. The task force favored making semantic changes that some psychiatrists have long argued for, trading the term “mental retardation” for “intellectual disability,” for instance, and “substance abuse” for “addiction.”
One of the most controversial proposals was to identify “risk syndromes,” that is, a risk of developing a disorder like schizophrenia or dementia. Studies of teenagers identified as at high risk of developing psychosis, for instance, find that 70 percent or more in fact do not come down with the disorder.
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Milk for Mom May Lower Baby’s MS Risk
February 10th, 2010
All Headline News
By David Goodhue
A recent study suggests women who drink milk while pregnant reduce the chances of their children being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis as an adult.
Harvard researchers gave 35,794 mothers of nurses a questionnaire in 2001 about their experiences and diet during pregnancy. Of the women, 199 of them developed MS over a 16-year year period.
The researchers said in a statement that the risk of MS is lower among women born to mothers who drank milk regularly or had other sources of dietary vitamin D while pregnant.
Other than fortified milk, sources of vitamin D include fatty fish like salmon and exposure to sunlight, the researchers said.
The study will be presented to the American Academy of Neurology’s 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto from April 10 to April 17.
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Radiation Therapy Can Harm the Brain – Affecting Memory and Attention
February 1, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Radiation therapy for the treatment of brain tumors may lead to cognitive decline later in life, according to a study conducted by researchers from VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and published in The Lancet Neurology.
Scientists have known for some time that radiation therapy can damage healthy brain tissue, but prior research found no immediate negative effects from the treatment. In the new study, researchers conducted brain function tests on 65 patients who had undergone treatment for low-grade glioma 12 years previously.
Low-grade glioma is one of the most common forms of brain tumor. It is non-carcinogenic, and can often be removed with surgery. However, many doctors use radiotherapy following surgery.
The researchers found that a full 53 percent of patients who had been treated with radiation exhibited problems with mental function 12 years after their treatment, compared with only 27 percent of those who had not undergone radiation treatment. Radiotherapy patients were especially likely to have problems with memory and attention.
Because the average patient survives a full decade after being diagnosed with low-grade glioma, the researchers noted that large numbers of patients will survive long enough to suffer the negative cognitive effects of radiotherapy. For this reason, they recommended that doctors avoid using radiation in the treatment of glioma unless absolutely necessary — such as in cases where the tumor returns after surgery, for example.
“It always depends on the patient, but if it is possible to defer radiotherapy, maybe people should,” lead researcher Linda Douw said.
Cancer research scientist Jeremy Rees of the United Kingdom’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery Honorary said that his hospital already avoids radiotherapy for low-grade glioma patients except when the tumor is already progressing or when the patient suffers from uncontrolled epilepsy.
“Surgery is generally a preferred option with chemotherapy or radiotherapy coming into play at a later stage, if the glioma progresses,” he said.
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An Idle Brain May Raise Learning Abilities
Why is it so hard to remember even things we don’t want to forget? The problem, suggests a growing body of research, may be that we’re thinking about them too much in the first place.Popular wisdom once held that a mind at rest was like an engine idling — not much going on under the hood. To glean insights into how the brain worked, scientists would study only volunteers in action, measuring their physiological or biochemical responses as they completed specific mental tasks. But more recently, thanks in large part to the proliferation of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which precisely maps brain activity based on changes in blood-oxygen levels, neuroscientists have found that important activity in the brain — related in particular to memory and learning — may occur when it is at rest.
Many studies over the past decade have suggested that sleep is crucial to the consolidation of memories and learning; people who take a nap after learning a new task, for instance, remember it better than those who don’t snooze. And now a small but compelling new study from the lab of New York University (NYU) cognitive neuroscientist Lila Davachi finds similar evidence that the brain at rest, even while remaining awake, is conducting meaningful activity. “Your brain is doing work for you even when you’re resting,” says Davachi, who just published a study in Neuron showing that certain kinds of brain activity actually increase during waking rest and are correlated with better memory consolidation. “Taking a rest may actually contribute to your success at work or school,” she adds.
The 16 participants who served as Davachi’s guinea pigs in the study were each scanned, while at rest, before the experiment began. Then, each volunteer was asked to lie flat on the bed of an fMRI machine, outside the magnet, while shown a series of paired images. First they looked at pairs of faces and objects, and were instructed to imagine the person pictured interacting with the object (such as a beach ball). Then they got a few minutes’ rest, before being rolled into the magnet for another scan. The experiment was repeated with pairs of new faces and scenes. Afterward, the participants took a pop quiz to measure their recognition of the faces, objects and scenes they had previously seen.
The purpose of the scans was to compare the relative levels of spontaneous neural activity in two key brain regions involved in memory — the hippocampus and visual cortex — during rest, both before and after the visual tasks. The NYU team noticed that levels of activity in the two areas were more closely correlated several minutes after people had looked at the images than before they started the experiment. That suggests that the visual-learning tasks had affected the brain’s seemingly random firings during rest, and perhaps that the brain was conducting memory-consolidating activity during that time.What’s more, the more closely correlated the brain activity during the rest period, the better the person performed on the tests of recognition. “We found that higher correlations [of activity in the hippocampus and visual cortex] during rest periods leads to high future memory,” notes Arielle Tambini, a graduate student in Davachi’s lab and lead author of the paper.While the NYU study tested memory and simple recognition, other recent research looking at activity in the brain at rest and the learning of complex visual tasks has yielded similar results. Neurologist Maurizio Corbetta of Washington University in St. Louis recruited 14 people to use their peripheral vision to identify a hidden pattern — an inverted T — that was flashed briefly on a screen inside an fMRI machine. After each daily training session, lasting one to two hours for about a week, participants were given an hour’s rest, during which time Corbetta scanned their brains.
As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, Corbetta’s team found that spontaneous brain activity in two separate regions of the cerebral cortex appeared to be correlated after the participants had learned the visual task, but were not linked beforehand. The brain activity in those who were best at finding the hidden pattern onscreen was most strongly related. “Our test was like a video game. What this research shows is that we have a very dynamic landscape of ongoing activity [in the brain] even when we are at rest,” notes Corbetta.One question that has plagued researchers is whether the observed increase in brain activity that occurs after the completion of a mental task is just a ripple or echo effect, rather than a distinct event that helps solidify memories. Harvard researcher Dale Stevens believes he has more or less ruled out the former possibility by showing that even tasks that produce similar levels of neural activity while they are being performed, such as recognizing a face versus a landscape, result in different levels of activity after each task is completed. In Stevens’ studies, brain activity remained high after people viewed landscapes, but was much lower after they looked at faces. People tend to be much better at remembering landscapes than faces, so it makes sense that those differences would be mirrored in the brain-activity levels during rest periods, says Stevens, whose paper was published online in Cerebral Cortex in December 2009.While the NYU, Washington University and Harvard studies all used different approaches, their overall findings were remarkably similar. “The brain is trying to weave ideas together even when you don’t think you are thinking of anything,” notes Johns Hopkins behavioral neurologist and memory expert Dr. Barry Gordon. That’s something to keep in mind the next time you catch yourself daydreaming in a meeting or idly surfing Facebook when you should be studying.
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Blueberry Juice Could Stave Off Dementia & Improve Memory
January 22, 2010
Web Md
By Jennifer Warner
Swapping out the usual OJ for blueberry juice in the morning may give your brain a memory boost.
A new study shows that drinking a daily dose of wild blueberry juice improved the memory of older adults with age-related memory problems.
It’s the first study to show a potential benefit of blueberries in improving memory in older adults at risk for dementia.
“The findings of this preliminary study suggest that moderate-term blueberry supplementation can confer neurocognitive benefit,” write researcher Robert Krikorian, of the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center, and colleagues in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Researchers say blueberries contain a wealth of phytochemicals that have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. In addition, animal studies have shown that the polyphenols found in blueberries, anthocyanins, have been shown to increase signaling in brain centers associated with memory as well as improve how the brain gets rid of glucose, all of which may help slow memory decline.
In the study, researchers looked at the effects of drinking wild blueberry juice on memory decline in nine adults in their 70s who were experiencing age-related memory decline problems, such as memory lapses.
The participants drank about two and a half cups each day of blueberry juice made from commercially available frozen wild blueberries for 12 weeks. A comparison group of seven older adults drank a similar amount of placebo non-juice beverage for the same time period.
Researchers conducted memory tests, such as word association and list learning and recall tasks, at the beginning and end of the study.
The results showed that those who drank blueberry juice showed significant improvement on learning and memory tests compared to the placebo group.
Researchers say there were also trends suggesting reduced symptoms of depression and lower glucose levels among the wild blueberry juice drinkers, but further research will be needed to confirm these results.
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1 in 110 US Children had Autism in 2006
December 21, 2009
CNN
By Miriam Falco
A new report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that one in 110 children in the United States had autism in 2006.
“The average prevalence of autism among 8-year-olds increased by 57 percent,” according to Catherine Rice, lead author of the report and a behavioral health scientist at the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.
The research shows that boys still outnumber girls in autism prevalence. One in 70 boys were diagnosed with the disorder, compared with one in 315 girls. However, girls diagnosed with autism often have more severe symptoms.
To better understand the prevalence of autism, the CDC reviewed the records of children diagnosed with autism from physicians and schools in 11 sites across the country that are part of the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network.
The new report tracks autism prevalence among 8-year-olds from 2006 in 11 states and compares it with data collected at 14 monitoring sites in 2002, when the prevalence of autism averaged 1 in 150 children. Ten of these sites are represented in both reports.
Geri Dawson, chief science officer for the advocacy group Autism Speaks, said this report validates early estimates of how many children are affected by autism.
“We now have firm evidence that autism spectrum disorders affect a staggering 1 percent of children, and this increase cannot be fully accounted for by broader diagnosis or earlier diagnosis.”
“Autism spectrum disorder” is an umbrella term for three types of neurological disorders that can lead to significant social, communication and behavioral challenges. According to the CDC, those are autistic disorder, or classic autism, and the two milder forms: Asperger’s syndrome and atypical autism called Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified.
“I was surprised by the increase [in prevalence],” Dr. Gary Goldstein said. Goldstein is president and CEO of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
“Nine of the 10 sites had an increase; nobody had a decrease,” Goldstein added.
The Kennedy Krieger Institute provides therapies and services for children with autism and conducts research to find the causes of autism spectrum disorders. The institute also works with Autism Speaks.
Not all experts are convinced that there is a surge in autism cases. Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a pediatric neurologist at Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, believes that some children may be given the autism label without meeting the actual case definition for the disorder.
He points to a part in the report that said 54 percent of children were confirmed as meeting the autism spectrum disorder case definition, which means almost half did not. “This suggests that overdiagnosis is occurring in the population,” Wiznitzer said.
The CDC report also found a slight improvement in when children were diagnosed with the disorder. The average age of diagnosis was 4½ years, a five-month improvement from 2002. But that’s too late, according to some experts.
“The other shocker for me is how little the age of diagnosis changed,” Goldstein said. “What didn’t change was the average age of parental concern.”
Rice says the new CDC report found that in most cases, parents had concerns before their children were 2 years old, and yet children weren’t getting the official diagnosis until more than three years later. The longer it takes for a child to get diagnosed with autism, the more the start of therapy is delayed.
“That is still too late,” Wiznitzer said. He added that he would consider a diagnosis between 4 and 5 years a “late diagnosis” in his practice. “We need to do a better job of identifying children earlier on.”
Goldstein agrees. He says that to diagnose “at 53 months [4½ years] is too late to get into early intervention. We know that we can diagnose at 24 months, and we know early intervention works.”
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Patient Trapped in a 23 Year Coma Was Conscious The Whole Time
November 23, 2009
Mail Online
By Allan Hall
A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.
‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.
‘I dreamed myself away,’ he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer.
Doctors used a range of coma tests before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.
But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.
Mr Houben described the moment as ‘my second birth’. Therapy has since
Mr Houben, a former martial arts enthusiast, was paralysed in 1983.
Doctors in Zolder, Belgium, used the internationally accepted Glasgow Coma Scale to assess his eye, verbal and motor responses. But each time he was graded incorrectly.
Only a re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege discovered that he had lost control of his body but was still fully aware of what was happening.
He is never likely to leave hospital, but as well as his computer he now has a special device above his bed which lets him read books while lying down.
Mr Houben said: ‘I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me – it was my second birth.
‘I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.’
Dr Laureys’s new study claims that patients classed as in a vegetative state are often misdiagnosed.
‘Anyone who bears the stamp of “unconscious” just one time hardly ever gets rid of it again,’ he said.
The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, found Mr Houben’s brain was still working by using state-of-the-art imaging.
He plans to use the case to highlight what he considers may be similar examples around the world.
Dr Laureys said: ‘In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury.
‘About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health.
‘But an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage – they go on living without ever coming back again.’
Supporters of euthanasia and assisted suicide argue that people who have lain in persistent vegetative states for years should be given the opportunity to have crucial medical support withdrawn because of the ‘indignity’ of their condition.
But there have been several cases in which people judged to be in vegetative states or deep comas have recovered.
Twenty years ago, Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, regained consciousness after a year, took small amounts of food by mouth and engaged in conversation.
Only days before her recovery, a judge had granted her family’s request for the removal of the feeding tube which had been keeping her alive.
In the UK in 1993, doctors switched off the life support system keeping alive Tony Bland, a 22-year- old who had been in a coma for three years following the Hillsborough disaster.
Dr Laureys was not available for comment yesterday and it is not clear why he thought Mr Houben should have the hi-tech screening when so many years had passed.
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Remove Heavy Metals in the Body With Cilantro
November 09, 2009
Natural News
By Mike Adams
Heavy metals are extremely toxic to human neurology. Mercury, lead and cadmium all contribute aggressively to the deterioration of neurological function. Fortunately, there’s a simple, natural way to detox your body and remove these toxic substances from your tissues.
The solution is cilantro. It’s that magical-tasting herb often used in Mexican food recipes. As it turns out, cilantro not only taste great, it also binds to heavy metals and helps remove them from your body.
Below, we’re collected some important research on this remarkable ability of the cilantro herb. Read them all to learn more, then whip up your own delicious recipes using raw cilantro in your own kitchen!
Food, after all, is really potent medicine. You can also purchase cilantro liquid extracts from places like Baseline Nutritionals (their product is called “Metal Magic”) or other vendors of quality superfood supplements.
Cilantro removes heavy metals
Supplements helpful in the detoxification process include: cilantro, Vitamin C, selenium, garlic and others. Eating a clean diet, free of pesticides and hormones, is a must for a detoxification program. I encourage my patients to eat whole foods, with adequate amounts of protein. Eliminating the “whites”– refined sugar, refined flour, and refined salt will help any health condition and help any detoxification program. The glycemic index of carbohydrates can be a helpful guide on which carbohydrates to eat and which to avoid.
- The Miracle of Natural Hormones by David Brownstein
Add cilantro to meals; it can help remove heavy metals. Add dark green leafy vegetables, which contain chlorophyll, a helpful detoxifier. Get curcuminoids from spices such as turmeric. Try herbal detoxification teas containing mixtures of burdock root, dandelion root, ginger root, licorice root, sarsaparilla root, cardamom seed, cinnamon bark, and other herbs.
- Ultraprevention : The 6-Week Plan That Will Make You Healthy for Life by Mark Hyman, M.D.
There are several natural chelation products that use only the cilantro and chlorella to extremely positive effect supporting the basic premises being put forth here. The addition of ALA brings in the leading work of Dr. Andrew Hall Cutler, who is one of the world’s leading experts on mercury detoxification. His extensive and successful use of ALA has won him a large devoted audience.
- Transdermal Magnesium Therapy by Mark Sircus
Metal Magic is made from two simple herbs: cilantro and chlorella. Alone, each of these has the ability to bind with heavy metals, and together they make a very powerful metal detoxification substance that can literally pull mercury, lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals right out of your body, thereby sparing your body the damage that would normally be caused by those heavy metals. This is potentially a life-saving product, and it can certainly save the health of a fetus, if you happen to be pregnant or you plan to have a pregnancy in the near future.
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Vitamin D Key to Healthy Brain
August 10, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Sufficient vitamin D intake may play a critical role in maintaining brain function later in life, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Manchester and published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
“This is further evidence from observational studies that vitamin D is likely to be beneficial to reduce many age-related diseases,” said Tim Spector of King’s College London, who was not involved in the study. “Taken together with similar data that shows its importance in reducing arthritis, osteoporotic fractures, as well as heart disease and some cancers, this underscores the importance of vitamin D for humans and why evolution gave us a liking for the sun.”
Researchers measured blood levels of vitamin D in more than 3,000 European men between the ages of 40 and 79 then had the men undergo various tests of mental function, including memory and information processing. They found that the men with the highest blood levels did best on the test, while those with the lowest levels performed worst.
Another study earlier this year also found that higher levels of vitamin D appeared to protect against age-related cognitive decline.
The researchers were not able to determine which biological pathways vitamin D might act through to protect the aging brain, but they hypothesized that it might increase levels of protective antioxidants, increase key hormone levels, or suppress a hyperactive immune system that can lead to brain degeneration.
The researchers warned that vitamin D deficiency is widespread, especially among the elderly, who have decreased absorption from both food and sun sources.
Vitamin D is synthesized by the body when the sun is exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. The average light-skinned person can get enough vitamin D from roughly 15 minutes of sun on their face and hands per day, significantly less than the time it takes to burn. Darker skinned people, the elderly, and those living far from the equator (particularly during the winter) may need more sun to synthesize the same amount.
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