Diet and Parkinson's disease

I've been studying nutrition and the brain for awhile now, and it's clear I'm a big fan of omega-3 fatty acids. It's only been recently that their role in Parkinson's disease prevention is becoming clear.

Oxidative stress, or aging, is to the brain what rust is to your car. In Parkinson's disease, oxidation appears to significantly affect the brain systems regulating dopamine.

In this study, rat brain tissue was exposed to several by-products of fatty acids found in the brain, docosahexaenoic acid and arachidonic acid. It turned out that the arachidonic acid--derived compound was the most toxic to brain cells.

Arachidonic acid is derived from two main sources, certain dietary oils, and meats. It's fairly easy to identify the oils that promote arachidonic acid production. They tend to be those, which in English, begin with the letters "S" and "C"; soybean, safflower, sunflower, sesame, corn, cottonseed...the only exception would be canola. These oils have been unloaded into the food supply in recent years and as they have, many diseases, not just Parkinson's, have been on the upswing. Start reading your labels!

Arachidonic acid is also found in meat. So if you are eating large portions of meat instead of balancing your protein with other types of food, your diet may be out of balance and promoting inflammation/oxidation/aging, particularly in the nervous system. Some rules to follow which you've heard before, for other reasons, include: eat more seafood and less red meat, eat more vegetarian meals, and limit your meat portions to the size of the palm of your hand without the fingers.

Parkinson's is not a problem to be taken lightly. If you have ever known someone who has had to deal with the tremors and deterioration in quality of life...you know what I mean. Some very simple dietary choices may help you to delay or prevent having to personally deal with this challenging diagnosis.

Liu X, Yamada N, Maruyama W, Osawa T. Formation of dopamine adducts derived from brain polyunsaturated fatty acids: mechanism for Parkinson disease. J Biol Chem. 2008 Dec 12;283(50):34887-95. Epub 2008 Oct 15.

Aging brains and medicine

How medications work at different points in life can be a very important consideration. I see many, many studies looking at the viability of antidepressant therapy in the elderly. Recently there seems to be a flurry of research looking at how to medicate (note I did not use the word "treat") depression when it occurs as a comorbidity with diagnoses such as stroke or Alzheimer's disease.

In this study, the naturalistic finding was that as rats (and probably humans, too) age, the rate at which they are able to generate new neurons declines. The survival rate of those new cells starts to deteriorate as well.

The good news is that the response to fluoxetine (Prozac) was the same across the board.

The bad news is, that in none of the groups, even the young rats who had a better ability to make new neurons, did fluoxetine enhance that ability.

Hmmm...is it just me, or does it make sense that if a medication is going to work, it needs some brain cells to work on?

Cowen DS, Takase LF, Fornal CA, Jacobs BL. Age-dependent decline in hippocampal neurogenesis is not altered by chronic treatment with fluoxetine. Brain Res. 2008 Sep 4;1228:14-9. Epub 2008 Jun 24.

Let me sleep on it

Sleep problems, insulin function, weight gain, and mental health diagnoses...these four issues seem to be BFF's in the world of neuroscience. Is it that people with mental health issues just don't sleep well...or does insomnia promote the development of these issues? Does weight gain cause insulin dysfunction...or vice versa? It's hard to sort through all of the possibilities and definitively conclude, but it's important to remember that taking care of yourself in a number of areas, not just watching what you eat, can be important in managing all of these issues.

Sleep is the one most people have a hard time with. They don't get enough of it, they deprive themselves of it when life throws them curve balls, they even brag about how little they get. But the evidence is overwhelming, every single organ in the body struggles to work the way that it should when we view sleep as a lifestyle inconvenience rather than a necessity.

It's about the hormone, melatonin. It's not just the thing that makes you sleepy, and it's not just the supplement you can take when you can't sleep, it's one of the body's most powerful anti-oxidants and anti-aging chemicals. When we don't sleep, we set ourselves up to self-destruct and physically age, much, much faster than we need to.

Take the pancreas. It's the organ that releases insulin whenever we eat and need to transport all that energy into cells.

In the presence of melatonin, researchers observed that it helps the body to better manage the way it uses insulin. There seemed to be a better response to the cascade of hormones and signals that manage blood glucose levels...and then...to the hormones that transport that glucose to where it needs to be used.

If you think about how you feel after a night of tossing and turning...you're a little groggy and maybe slow to react to events and just "not completely with it"...consider that it's not just your head that's feeling that way. Your entire body has to work harder to be on target when it doesn't get the right amount of sleep.

And keep in mind, when your insulin is not working the way it should, your body also doesn't manage weight the way it should. Practically every client I work with has sleep issues. And they all know, because I drill it into them every time we meet, if they don't get their sleep under control, there's not a whole lot that diet and exercise are going to be able to do about weight. First things first.

Ramracheya RD, Muller DS, Squires PE, Brereton H, Sugden D, Huang GC, Amiel SA, Jones PM, Persaud SJ. Function and expression of melatonin receptors on human pancreatic islets. J Pineal Res. 2008 Apr;44(3):273-9.