Fw: Rewiring the Brain/ Psychotherapy, Brain & Guts/ Paleo Diets

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" Healing Autism: No Finer a Cause on the Planet "

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February 21, 2001 Search www.feat.org/search/news.asp

Also: * Psychotherapy & Funct. Dyspepsia: Brain-Gut Interactions

* First, Catch Your Cow: Paleo Diets

Rewiring the Brain

[by Langreth, Forbes Global.]

http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0305/054.html

Lauri Sandoval tried more than a dozen drugs to treat the deep

depression that darkened most of her adult life. None worked for long.

Unable to hold a steady job, the 42-year-old resident of New Mexico had to

move in with her mother two years ago. Then she underwent surgery to implant

an experimental device that treats her blues by transmitting tiny pulses of

electricity to nerves in her neck.

Soon this minishock therapy started to work. Today Sandoval is back to

working full time as a personal assistant to a Hollywood star. " It's

incredible, " she says. " I am actually happy. I've never been able to say

that before. "

The device that brought her back, made by the publicly held Cyberonics

in Houston, Texas, is one of a new generation of pacemaker-style gadgets

that use mild electrical jolts to treat myriad mental and neurological

illnesses. While they aren't cures, they may reduce or eliminate symptoms in

severe cases, offering hope to millions of patients.

The brain uses electrical current to communicate within itself and

with other parts of the body. When that fragile circuitry goes awry, it can

play a role in disorders ranging from depression to epilepsy to Parkinson's

disease. Researchers are learning that precisely targeting barely noticeable

pulses to affected areas of the brain can help restore some normal function

to the cerebral circuitry.

Cyberonics' poker-chip-size device, surgically implanted in the chest,

is approved for treating drug-resistant epilepsy and has moved into

final-stage human tests for the far bigger market of drug-resistant

depression. The medical device giant Medtronic is testing a related

technique called deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes from a device

in the chest are surgically threaded several centimeters into the brain to

the site of damage. The method is approved in the U.S. for tremor and could

win clearance for Parkinson's disease later this year. A third method avoids

surgery: At a doctor's office, a patient wear a magnetic device on his head

that generates gentle currents in parts of the brain hit by depression and

schizophrenia. It's being tested by Neotonus of Marietta, Georgia, and

others.

This new field is " exploding, " says Stanford , a Neotonus vice

president. (Skip) Cummins, the ceo of Cyberonics, says: " It's a

gigantic opportunity. We are talking about some of the largest medical

markets in the world. "

Doctors have spent decades using drugs to tweak aberrant brain

chemicals, with only limited success. For example, of 6 million Americans

treated for depression, more than a million don't respond to drugs. Of the

U.S.' 2.5 million epileptics, about 10% can't be helped by chemical therapy.

Drugs for Parkinson's disease often work initially, but their effectiveness

fades.

Scientists have long thought that electricity might help, but until

recently they have been unable to precisely target particular regions of the

brain. Electroshock therapy, the decades-old treatment of last resort for

depression, indiscriminately blasts the entire head to induce seizures and

jar patients out of their blues. While effective, it can cause severe

short-term memory loss.

The new techniques are better aimed with less collateral damage. Among

the more promising is Cyberonics' vagus-nerve stimulation approach,

pioneered by Zabara, its scientific founder who's a retired Temple

University physiologist.

The vagus nerve links the brain to such major organs as the heart and

lungs. Until recently researchers thought that it was a one-way conduit,

sending messages from the brain to the body. Zabara while watching his wife

use breathing techniques to control her labor pains during the birth of

their first child in 1971 realized that the one-way theory might be wrong.

He theorized that the pain-dulling effect also owed to feedback from the

lungs back up through the vagus nerve to the brain. He also wondered if the

vagus might help regulate other brain functions.

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* * *

Psychotherapy and Functional Dyspepsia: Brain-Gut Interactions

J. K. DiBaise, M.D.

Hamilton J, Guthrie E, Creed F, et al. A randomized controlled trial of

psychotherapy in patients with functional dyspepsia. Gastroenterology 2000;

119:661-9.

http://www-east.elsevier.com/ajg/issues/9602/ajg3592dis.htm

Psychological factors can be identified in many patients with

functional bowel disorders (FBDs). Indeed, there are data to suggest that

these psychological factors are important contributors to symptoms in FBDs.

Psychological therapy could therefore be beneficial to patients with these

conditions. Hamilton and colleagues compared the efficacy of

psychodynamic-interpersonal (PI) psychotherapy with a psychological control

( " supportive therapy " ) in patients with chronic symptoms of functional

dyspepsia who had failed to respond to conventional pharmacological therapy.

Seventy-five patients were randomized, observed for psychological and

gastrointestinal symptoms, and assessed by intention-to-treat analysis.

Forty-nine of them also underwent a radioisotope gastric-emptying test.

At the end of the 12-wk course of treatment, gastrointestinal symptom

scores were significantly better in the PI group than the controls.

Additionally, these symptom improvements were correlated with improvements

in psychological symptoms in the PI group alone. One year after treatment,

the symptom scores were similar between the two groups; however, a post hoc

analysis showed that PI therapy was superior to the control group when

patients with severe heartburn were excluded. At the end of treatment and 1

yr later, a reduction in the use of health services was seen in both groups.

There was no difference in outcome between patients with normal and those

with abnormal gastric emptying.

The authors conclude that PI psychotherapy may have both short and

long term benefits in patients with chronic, medically unresponsive,

functional dyspepsia. Regardless of the generalizability of these results

and the lack of clear-cut proof of efficacy, this study was well conceived

and conducted and represents the renewed interest in brain-gut interactions

in FBDs. Despite the limitations of this study, treatment with psychotherapy

of some form remains a promising option, because of the many hints that

psychological factors play an important role in FBDs and functional

dyspepsia in particular. Future studies dealing with selection of an

appropriate patient, the appropriate therapy for each patient, and the

health economics of this therapy are certainly indicated before widespread

implementation can be recommended. Copyright ©2001 the American College of

GastroenterologyHamilton J, Guthrie E, Creed F, et al.

* * *

First, Catch Your Cow

[Too much gluten is not good.]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/20/features/features3.html

Research into the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers shows that our diet

of cereals and grain-fed meat is not what we have evolved to eat, writes

Macgregor.

A group of scientists, from dozens of disciplines, has lately started

to put together a model of the diet " designed " by evolution for the human

body. When the dust settles on their investigations, most of today's

arguments about human nutrition might have been laid to rest.

The new field of " evolutionary diet " is (literally) unearthing the

dietary patterns of our paleolithic ancestors. The paleolithic was

humanity's final formative period, stretching for hundreds of thousands of

years, and culminating about 10,000 years ago.

After this time, cereal crops were domesticated, and humankind began

to eat grains. This was a dramatic departure - until that moment we had

evolved for at least 2 million years as hunter-gatherers and scavengers.

A scientist who has researched paleolithic diet for many years,

Professor Loren Cordain of Colorado State University, says that after humans

started domesticating crops, low levels of vitamins, minerals and amino

acids led to " poor general health " - and a drop in human stature of 10 to 15

centimetres. Cordain is perhaps the world authority on evolutionary diet, or

" paleodiet " . Paleodiet information is derived, he says, from the fossils of

many human individuals, of up to 2.4 million years old.

He says that the change to an agricultural diet led to " an increase in

infant mortality, a reduction in life span, an increased incidence of

infectious diseases, an increase in iron deficiency anemia, an increased

incidence of ... bone mineral disorders and an increase in the number of

dental caries " .

Another paleo-scientist, Professor Arthur de Vany of California State

University, puts it more pointedly: " It is easy to tell from the skeletons

of our ancestors whether they were agriculturists or hunter-gatherers. The

agriculturists have bad teeth, bone lesions, small and underdeveloped

skeletons, and small craniums, compared to hunter-gatherers. "

Naturally these findings have prompted closer study of what we were

eating before the advent of agriculture - when there were lower levels of

disease. It has posed the question: which foods has evolution equipped homo

sapiens to thrive on?

Work is not complete on this, but some broad facts are emerging. First

and foremost is that humans, and pre-humans, have eaten meat continuously

for 2 to 3 million years. Meat has, for the most part, been the largest

single component of the human diet. Our ancestors were likely more

interested in animals' organs - tongue, heart, liver, kidney - than the

flesh, the former having greater micronutrients and " good " fats.

Paleolithic humans' carbohydrate came chiefly from roots, tubers,

leaves and wild fruits. But modern humans can't take this as licence to eat

large amounts of fruit. " Ancestral " fruit was vastly less sugary than

today's selectively bred varieties, and far more fibrous. Replicating it

from your greengrocer would necessitate concentrating on vegetables and " low

glycemic index " (less sugary) fruit.

Cordain believes today's surviving hunter-gatherers provide a fair

guide to the ratio of plant-to-animal food in the paleolithic diet: his

surveys reveal that these people eat up to 65 per cent of their calories in

animal food, and 35 per cent in plant food.

The present animal-plant ratio in the US diet is 38:62 - a

near-reversal of the evolutionary pattern. Cordain cites these macronutrient

ratios, in calories:

paleolithic: fat-22% protein-37% carbohydrate-41%

US today: fat-34% protein-15.5% carbohydrate-49%

So we now eat more than 50 per cent more fat than we evolved on - and

much of it " new " fats, notably those in oils and dairy. But the larger

difference is in our protein consumption - which is less than half what it

was. But today's meat-eater should be careful in emulating paleolithic

protein intakes, too. Ancestral game was free-ranging, and highly active.

Today's slaughter animals are often fed a diet high in cereals - which does

to animals what it does to humans: kicks up insulin, which tells the body to

store fat. Paleo-scientists counsel eating white or lean meat.

The ancestral record does not support the SAD (standard Australian

diet) - but neither does it add credence to diets seen as " natural " by

vegetarians, fruitarians, natural hygienists, macrobiotic followers and

their countless splinter groups.

There have been striking individual health improvements in those

applying paleodiet principles - including remissions from chronic fatigue,

autism, diabetes and MS. But these are one-offs. There have, as yet, been no

clinical trials of the paleolithic diet - insofar as there is even consensus

on what it is. And, of course, the diet of our paleolithic ancestors was

inseparable from their whole lifestyle - the most crucial aspect of which

was exercise.

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" Open Your Eyes to Autism "

and be a part of

" The Power of ONE "

April 25-27, 2001 in Washington, D.C.

Unlocking Autism presents this year's " Power of ONE " Conference and Rally

for National Autism Awareness in Washington, D.C. April 25-27, 2001

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Lenny Schafer, Editor PhD Ron Sleith Kay Stammers

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