Re: IBS/Jeanne

[Guest guest]

But the whole thing is.........I'm not stressed.I have almost 0 stress in my

life.

Jeanne and Dave wrote:

A lot of fast moving IBS is brought on by stress, or stress adds to it. That is

why some docs prescribe the anti-d's. You may say, " i'm not depressed. " And

maybe that's true. But balancing out the seratonin in your brain can make it

easier to deal with stress, thus easing some of your IBS symtoms. Not saying

you HAVE to take them, just explaining why they might be prescribed.

Jeanne in WI

Sometimes mine is fast moving and sometimes not. I could CRAMP SO BAD and still

have a few mins to spare.then there are times where I HAVE TO GO RIGHT NOW! I

hate the horrible cramps with it! I got dizzy sitting on the commode one day

because the cramps were so bad. I hate IBS so much! I love love love broccoli

but if I eat it,I am going to be hurting for certain. I really need to take

fiber daily so it will help the IBS. I also found out that the doctor gives you

antidepressants for IBS. I REFUSE TO TAKE IT! LOL,I refuse to take any meds so

what am I talking about,lol

[Guest guest]

,

Most of the serotonin in your body is in your GI tract (95%). A good book

for reviewing all that is The Second Brain by Gershon which is

talked about in the article I've put below from the NYTimes. It may be

that a lot of the medication we take (thinking we are treating the brain)

is actually treating the gut far more.

When I was in graduate school I read a chart that REALLY haunted me,

showing me all the different drugs meant to modulate dopamine chemistry and

showing how quickly and how thoroughly each drug would bind and modify the

receptor to which its function was aimed. The curious observation in the

text was that the change in behavior that the drug eventually affected had

absolutely no relationship to how the drug bound its intended receptor. In

other words, they had no idea what actually produced the intended

behavioral results. This, along with many other things I learned in the

neuoscience department, taught me that in a lot of neurophamacology, we

really have no clue why drugs work when they work.

I also was a speaker at an autism conference where two other speakers were

psychiatrists talking about drugs used to treat autism. I think both men

were also parents of children with autism and they were refreshingly

honest. Their take was that the selection process for drugs that might

help autism was no easier to select than throwing darts at a

dartboard. Sometimes what they did worked, but a lot of the time they

didn't, and no one was able to figure out why they worked or why they didn't.

I'm all for better science, and for science less driven by the profit

motive for developing and selling new products on which people stay

dependent. The important issue is this: What broke and why, and can we

set things back to normal so that the drugs aren't needed? That kind of

question will never be proposed by a pharmaceutical company, for they

cannot make money by returning anyone to normal.

From today's NY Times.

August 23, 2005

The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes

By HARRIET BROWN

Two brains are better than one. At least that is the rationale for the

close - sometimes too close - relationship between the human body's two

brains, the one at the top of the spinal cord and the hidden but powerful

brain in the gut known as the enteric nervous system.

For Dr. D. Gershon, the author of " The Second Brain " and the

chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia, the

connection between the two can be unpleasantly clear. " Every time I call

the National Institutes of Health to check on a grant proposal, " Dr.

Gershon said, " I become painfully aware of the influence the brain has on

the gut. "

In fact, anyone who has ever felt butterflies in the stomach before giving

a speech, a gut feeling that flies in the face of fact or a bout of

intestinal urgency the night before an examination has experienced the

actions of the dual nervous systems.

The connection between the brains lies at the heart of many woes, physical

and psychiatric. Ailments like anxiety, depression, irritable bowel

syndrome, ulcers and Parkinson's disease manifest symptoms at the brain and

the gut level.

" The majority of patients with anxiety and depression will also have

alterations of their GI function, " said Dr. Emeran Mayer, professor of

medicine, physiology and psychiatry at the University of California, Los

Angeles.

A study in 1902 showed changes in the movement of food through the

gastrointestinal tract in cats confronted by growling dogs.

One system's symptoms - and cures - may affect the other. Antidepressants,

for example, cause gastric distress in up to a quarter of the people who

take them. Butterflies in the stomach are caused by a surge of stress

hormones released by the body in a " fight or flight " situation. Stress can

also overstimulate nerves in the esophagus, causing a feeling of choking.

Dr. Gershon, who coined the term " second brain " in 1996, is one of a number

of researchers who are studying brain-gut connections in the relatively new

field of neurogastroenterology. New understandings of the way the second

brain works, and the interactions between the two, are helping to treat

disorders like constipation, ulcers and Hirschprung's disease.

The role of the enteric nervous system is to manage every aspect of

digestion, from the esophagus to the stomach, small intestine and colon.

The second brain, or little brain, accomplishes all that with the same

tools as the big brain, a sophisticated nearly self-contained network of

neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and proteins.

The independence is a function of the enteric nervous system's complexity.

" Rather than Mother Nature's trying to pack 100 million neurons someplace

in the brain or spinal cord and then sending long connections to the GI

tract, the circuitry is right next to the systems that require control, "

said Jackie D. Wood, professor of physiology, cell biology and internal

medicine at Ohio State.

Two brains may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they make

literal and evolutionary sense.

" What brains do is control behavior, " Dr. Wood said. " The brain in your gut

has stored within its neural networks a variety of behavioral programs,

like a library. The digestive state determines which program your gut calls

up from its library and runs. "

When someone skips lunch, the gut is more or less silent. Eat a pastrami

sandwich, and contractions all along the small intestines mix the food with

enzymes and move it toward the lining for absorption to begin. If the

pastrami is rotten, reverse contractions will force it - and everything

else in the gut - into the stomach and back out through the esophagus at

high speed.

In each situation, the gut must assess conditions, decide on a course of

action and initiate a reflex.

" The gut monitors pressure, " Dr. Gershon said. " It monitors the progress of

digestion. It detects nutrients, and it measures acid and salts. It's a

little chemical lab. "

The enteric system does all this on its own, with little help from the

central nervous system.

The enteric nervous system was first described in 1921 by Dr. J. N.

Langley, a British physician who believed that it was one of three parts -

along with the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems - of the

autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary behaviors like

breathing and circulation. In this triad, the enteric nervous system was

seen as something of a tag-along to the other two.

After Langley died, scientists more or less forgot about the enteric

nervous system. Years later, when Dr. Gershon reintroduced the concept and

suggested that the gut might use some of the same neurotransmitters as the

brain, his theory was widely ridiculed.

" It was like saying that New York taxi drivers never miss a showing of

'Tosca' at the Met, " he recalled.

By the early 80's, scientists had accepted the idea of the enteric nervous

system and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in the gut.

It is no surprise that there is a direct relationship between emotional

stress and physical distress. " Clinicians are finally acknowledging that a

lot of dysfunction in GI disorders involves changes in the central nervous

system, " said M. Mawe, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the

University of Vermont.

The big question is which comes first, physiology or psychology?

The enteric and central nervous systems use the same hardware, as it were,

to run two very different programs. Serotonin, for instance, is crucial to

feelings of well-being. Hence the success of the antidepressants known as

S.S.R.I.'s that raise the level of serotonin available to the brain.

But 95 percent of the body's serotonin is housed in the gut, where it acts

as a neurotransmitter and a signaling mechanism. The digestive process

begins when a specialized cell, an enterochromaffin, squirts serotonin into

the wall of the gut, which has at least seven types of serotonin receptors.

The receptors, in turn, communicate with nerve cells to start digestive

enzymes flowing or to start things moving through the intestines.

Serotonin also acts as a go-between, keeping the brain in the skull up to

date with what is happening in the brain below. Such communication is

mostly one way, with 90 percent traveling from the gut to the head.

Many of those messages are unpleasant, and serotonin is involved in sending

them. Chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin, which is used to treat breast

cancer, cause serotonin to be released in the gut, leading to nausea and

vomiting. " The gut is not an organ from which you wish to receive frequent

progress reports, " Dr. Gershon said.

Serotonin is also implicated in one of the most debilitating gut disorders,

irritable bowel syndrome, or I.B.S., which causes abdominal pain and

cramping, bloating and, in some patients, alternating diarrhea and

constipation.

" You can run any test you want on people with I.B.S., and their GI tracts

look essentially normal, " Dr. Mawe said. The default assumption has been

that the syndrome is a psychosomatic disease.

But it turns out that irritable bowel syndrome, like depression, is at

least in part a function of changes in the serotonin system. In this case,

it is too much serotonin rather than too little.

In a healthy person, after serotonin is released into the gut and initiates

an intestinal reflex, it is whisked out of the bowel by a molecule known as

the serotonin transporter, or SERT, found in the cells that line the gut wall.

People with irritable bowel syndrome do not have enough SERT, so they wind

up with too much serotonin floating around, causing diarrhea.

The excess serotonin then overwhelms the receptors in the gut, shutting

them down and causing constipation.

When Dr. Gershon, whose work has been supported by Novartis, studied mice

without SERT, he found that they developed a condition very much like

I.B.S. in humans.

Several new serotonin-based drugs - intestinal antidepressants, in a way -

have brought hope for those with chronic gut disorders.

Another mechanism that lends credence to physiology as the source of

intestinal dysfunctions is the system of mast cells in the gut that have an

important role in immune response.

" During stress, trauma or 'fight or flight' reactions, the barrier between

the lumen, the interior of the gut where food is digested, and the rest of

the bowel could be broken, and bad stuff could get across, " Dr. Wood said.

" So the big brain calls in more immune surveillance at the gut wall by

activating mast cells. "

These mast cells release histamines and other inflammatory agents,

mobilizing the enteric nervous system to expel the perceived intruders, and

causing diarrhea.

Inflammation induced by mast cells may turn out to be crucial in

understanding and treating GI disorders. Inflamed tissue becomes tender. A

gut under stress, with chronic mast cell production and consequent

inflammation, may become tender, as well.

In animals, Dr. Mawe said, inflammation makes the sensory neurons in the

gut fire more often, causing a kind of sensory hyperactivity. " I have a

theory that some chronic disorders may be caused by something like

attention deficit disorder in the gut, " he said.

Dr. Gershon, too, theorizes that physiology is the original culprit in

brain-gut dysfunctions. " We have identified molecular defects in the gut of

everyone who has irritable bowel syndrome, " he said. " If you were chained

by bloody diarrhea to a toilet seat, you, too, might be depressed. "

Still, psychology clearly plays a role. Recent studies suggest that stress,

especially early in life, can cause chronic GI diseases, at least in

animals. " If you put a rat on top of a little platform surrounded by water,

which is very stressful for a rat, it develops the equivalent of diarrhea, "

Dr. Mayer said.

Another experiment showed that when young rats were separated from their

mothers, the layer of cells that line the gut, the same barrier that is

strengthened by mast cells during stress, weakened and became more

permeable, allowing bacteria from the intestine to pass through the bowel

walls and stimulate immune cells.

" In rats, it's an adaptive response, " Dr. Mayer said. " If they're born into

a stressful, hostile environment, nature programs them to be more vigilant

and stress responsive in their future life. "

He said up to 70 percent of the patients he treats for chronic gut

disorders had experienced early childhood traumas like parents' divorces,

chronic illnesses or parents' deaths. " I think that what happens in early

life, along with an individual's genetic background, programs how a person

will respond to stress for the rest of his or her life, " he said.

Either way, what is good for one brain is often good for the other, too. A

team of researchers from Penn State University recently discovered a

possible new direction in treating intestinal disorders, biofeedback for

the brain in the gut.

In an experiment published in a recent issue of Neurogastroenterology and

Motility, M. Stern, a professor of psychology at Penn State, found

that biofeedback helped people consciously increase and enhance their

gastrointestinal activity. They used the brains in their heads, in other

words, to help the brains in their guts, proving that at least some of the

time two brains really are better than one.

*

<http://www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/tpost.pl?smessage=3595>Resetting the

ANS:(348) karen (41): 2005-08-23 5:36 pm

[

At 02:06 PM 2/19/2008, you wrote:

>But the whole thing is.........I'm not stressed.I have almost 0 stress in

>my life.

>

>

>

>Jeanne and Dave

><<mailto:djgraves9497%40sbcglobal.net>djgraves9497@...> wrote: A

>lot of fast moving IBS is brought on by stress, or stress adds to it. That

>is why some docs prescribe the anti-d's. You may say, " i'm not depressed. "

>And maybe that's true. But balancing out the seratonin in your brain can

>make it easier to deal with stress, thus easing some of your IBS symtoms.

>Not saying you HAVE to take them, just explaining why they might be prescribed.

>Jeanne in WI

>

>Sometimes mine is fast moving and sometimes not. I could CRAMP SO BAD and

>still have a few mins to spare.then there are times where I HAVE TO GO

>RIGHT NOW! I hate the horrible cramps with it! I got dizzy sitting on the

>commode one day because the cramps were so bad. I hate IBS so much! I love

>love love broccoli but if I eat it,I am going to be hurting for certain. I

>really need to take fiber daily so it will help the IBS. I also found out

>that the doctor gives you antidepressants for IBS. I REFUSE TO TAKE IT!

>LOL,I refuse to take any meds so what am I talking about,lol

>

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

OK - I guess I am so hyper-stressed, to the point that even the smallest thing,

good or bad, affects my system, that I think it's that way with many of us. I

envy you and your " no-stress " life.

Jeanne in WI

But the whole thing is.........I'm not stressed.I have almost 0 stress in my

life.

Jeanne and Dave wrote:

A lot of fast moving IBS is brought on by stress, or stress adds to it. That is

why some docs prescribe the anti-d's. You may say, " i'm not depressed. " And

maybe that's true. But balancing out the seratonin in your brain can make it

easier to deal with stress, thus easing some of your IBS symtoms. Not saying

you HAVE to take them, just explaining why they might be prescribed.

Jeanne in WI