An Aging Brain Can be Reversed - Overwhelming Medical Proof
Forget what you've been told about losing brain function as you age -
this tool looks at how the brain works, and 74,000 scans from 90
different countries have proven it's possible to recover, repair, and
regain brain functionality that was previously lost...
By Dr. Mercola
One of my own recent interests has been brain plasticity - the ability
of your brain to recover, repair, and regain functionality that had
previously been lost. This idea conflicts with the conventional view
that once you lose brain function, it's permanently lost.
Dr. Daniel Amen is a physician and board-certified psychiatrist. He's
written five New York Times bestselling books, and is the medical
director of the Amen Clinics in Newport Beach in San Francisco,
California; Bellevue, Washington; Reston, Virginia; Atlanta, Georgia;
and New York City.
He's also one of the foremost experts on brain imaging science, which is
the topic of discussion in this interview. Brain plasticity features
heavily in Dr. Amen's work with SPECT imaging.
"About 10 years ago, I wrote a book called Change Your Brain, Change
Your Life. It's based on the imaging work that we've done," Dr. Amen
says.
"We can actually see the damage in your brain done by a wide variety of
things. But on what I call a brain-smart program, you can literally
improve the function of your brain, which is happening through
neuroplasticity. Your brain can actually look and feel younger, or look
and feel more repaired. Very few people know that."
SPECT Imaging - An Invaluable New Tool for Psychiatry
That the human brain has a tremendous amount of 'plasticity' was
demonstrated in one of Dr. Amen's studies on active and former NFL
players. Football players may have been hit in the head upward of
10,000-20,000 times in their lifetime, and this results in a significant
amount of brain damage for many. On Dr. Amen's program, 80 percent of
them showed significant improvement, including boosting function and
blood flow to the prefrontal cortex.
"We've had this rash of NFL suicides, which just breaks my heart,
because what they don't know is that there is help available to them,"
Dr. Amen says.
Brain SPECT imaging is different from the anatomical MRI or CT scans.
SPECT measures blood flow and activity patterns. It looks at how the
brain works. It's similar to positron emission tomography (PET) scans,
which looks at glucose metabolism. When using SPECT imaging, physicians
look for three things:
Areas of your brain that work well
Areas of your brain that are low in activity, and
Areas of your brain that are high in activity
The job then becomes balancing the different areas of your brain. The
Amen Clinics have performed over 74,000 scans on people from 90
different countries. Dr. Amen estimates they have more experience with
this technology than anyone else in the world.
"It's very exciting," Dr. Amen says. "I often say psychiatrists are the
only medical doctors that never look at the organ they treat. And when
you never look at it, you miss brain trauma, you miss seizure activity,
and you miss toxicity...
I'm a classically trained psychiatrist... I was taught to use
psychotherapy and medications, and that's pretty much it. Some of the
medications I was taught to use like Xanax, Ativan, or Valium for
anxiety disorders, when I first started ordering SPECT scans, I saw that
they made the brain look like [it had been exposed to] alcohol, and that
they were really toxic to brain function. That horrified me, and it was
the imaging work that led me to look for natural ways to decrease
anxiety."
... When we make a diagnosis, for example of depression, it's a symptom.
It shouldn't be a diagnosis. Making the diagnosis of depression, I tell
people, is like making the diagnosis of chest pain. And doctors don't
give people the diagnosis of chest pain, because it doesn't tell you
what's causing it, and it doesn't tell you what to do it for. Depression
is the same way.
If you don't get any physiological data on their brain, how would you
target [the treatment] to their brain? It becomes what's happening in
psychiatry today guesswork and multiple shots in the dark. I just
argue with my colleagues that that's just not smart. We can do better."
Common Causes of Depression and Anxiety
Dr. Amen's work shows that most cases of depression and anxiety are
really symptoms of underlying brain dysfunction. For example, depression
can arise if brain activity is too low in your frontal lobes. This
inactivity means you cannot inhibit your negative feelings. Depression
can also be a symptom of heightened or excessive activity in your
frontal lobes, as this leads to an inability to stop thinking the bad
thoughts in your head.
A traumatic brain injury can also result in symptoms of depression. In
fact, according to Dr. Amen, this is very common.
Other brain-related factors include toxic exposures, and/or a
combination of poor lifestyle habits such as a poor diet and lack of
exercise. Dr. Amen's treatments to optimize brain function focus on the
four-pronged approach of diet, exercise, nutritional supplements, and
correcting negative thought patterns.
How Brain Toxicity Alters Your Behavior
One of the major benefits of SPECT imaging is the ability to identify
damage caused by toxic exposures. Dr. Amen explains just how significant
such findings can be for the proper treatment:
"I had a patient recently who is diagnosed with ADD. He saw the best ADD
doctor in the country. He made the diagnosis basically after 10 minutes
of listening to his story. When we scanned him, he had a totally
toxic-looking brain. Of course, you have ADD symptoms if you know
there's damage to the front part of your brain. It turned out he had
arsenic poisoning. He needed a detoxification program, not more
Adderall."
He also describes a much more personal case where SPECT imaging turned
out to be a veritable lifesaver. Four years into his SPECT imaging work,
his sister-in-law called him about her then nine-year-old son, Andrew.
The boy had attacked a little girl on the baseball field that day for no
particular reason.
"I was horrified, and said, 'What else is going on with Andrew?' She
said, 'Danny, he's different. He's mean. He's surly. I went into his
room today, and I found two pictures he had drawn. One, he was hanging
from a tree. The other one, he was shooting other children.' I've been
doing imaging long enough to go, 'You need to bring him to see me.' What
we found was he had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying the space
of his left temporal lobe. It's an area we've subsequently really tagged
to violent behavior. When they took out the cyst, his behavior went back
to normal.
Still, sometimes when I tell the story, I'll cry, because I think about
all the people we're throwing away like Andrew as 'bad,' when in fact,
they may be sick.
Optimizing the brains of people who struggle, suffer, or even do bad
things is not popular. But it's the right thing to do. If someone has
problems with aggression, let's scan them and see if they've not had a
brain injury. We actually uncovered 20 different brain cysts over the
past 2 decades. I had a case last year of a teenage boy who wanted to
cut his mother up into little pieces. He had a cyst the size of a tennis
ball occupying the space of his left temporal and frontal lobe. We need
to look at what we do before we start changing people's brains. It's
logical... but the profession is very slow to change. I always argue
that there's no downside to looking."
How Brain Dysfunction Can Cause Psychiatric Disorders
In his work, Dr. Amen has identified seven types of anxiety and
depressions, six types of ADD, five types of overeaters, and six types
of addicts. As an example, he reviews some common types of overeaters
and the recommended treatment for them:
Compulsive overeaters, people who just can't stop thinking about food.
Here the front part of their brain works too hard. According to Dr.
Amen, that is typically related to a deficit in the neurotransmitter
serotonin. When serotonin levels go low (serotonin is, in large part,
inhibitory to your brain), your brain starts to over-fire. To address
this, Dr. Amen recommends intervention that boosts serotonin. While this
can be done using one of the SSRI's Prozac, Paxils, Zoloft, Lexapros,
and Celexa - you can also boost your serotonin levels naturally, using
5-HTP, L-tryptophan, St. John's Wort, or saffron.
"There are multiple studies now with saffron, showing it has equal
efficacy to antidepressants, and there are virtually no side effects to
taking higher doses of saffron," Dr. Amen says. "A compulsive person
leads us to a serotonin intervention. Exercise is also a serotonin
intervention. It boosts serotonin in your brain. Head to head
comparisons of exercise to Zoloft [show] they're equally effective at 12
weeks, but in 10 months exercise beats the socks off Zoloft."
Impulsive overeaters. Here, SPECT scans usually show low activity in the
prefrontal cortex, indicating they cannot inhibit their behavior. They
don't really think about food all the time, but as soon as they smell
it, they feel the urge to eat. Low prefrontal cortex activity is
generally associated with poor impulse control. It's also associated
with attention-deficit disorder (ADD).
"Please don't put them on a serotonin drug or a serotonin intervention,
because you'll lower their prefrontal cortex more and ultimately make
them more impulsive," Dr. Amen warns. "That's why you have the research
that came out in the early 90s about Prozac making you kill your mother.
Well, in fact, it can disinhibit people, because of what it's doing in
your brain. In impulsive people, we want to raise dopamine."
You can raise dopamine with drugs like Phentermine, an appetite
suppressant, or Ritalin, Adderall, or similar stimulants. But you can
also do it with green tea and with L-tyrosine. "We've actually seen
Rhodiola do something very similar in the brain," Dr. Amen says.
Using Food as Medicine
Certain foods also raise serotonin, such as simple carbohydrates. This
is another explanation for why you can become addicted to sugar, wheat,
and pasta. According to Dr. Amen, carbohydrate foods such as sweet
potato, brown rice, and oatmeal will also raise serotonin, but not in
the same powerful way that will get you addicted, so clearly these are
better options.
"A high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet is very good for impulsive
people, because it helps them focus," Dr. Amen says. "But it's a
disaster for our compulsive people, because they start to focus on the
things that upset them."
Another dietary factor of great importance is probiotics, ideally in the
form of traditionally
fermented foods. According to Dr. Amen, as much as 95 percent of the
serotonin in your body is produced in your gut, so strategies designed
to optimize gut production of serotonin could certainly go a long way
toward optimizing your mental health. I've become truly passionate about
teaching people to massively increase the amount of fermented foods
they're eating - specifically fermented vegetables, as these are some of
the most palatable fermented foods for most people - to replenish the
beneficial bacteria that produce serotonin.
Dr. Amen agrees:
"I've really been thinking a lot about gut health. Your gut is really
the second brain. They're totally interconnected... If you have a leaky
gut or an overgrowth of poor gut bacteria, you are not producing
serotonin and the other neurotransmitters that you need to stay healthy.
In the last seven or eight years, my last couple of books have been
about the connection between physical health and emotional health, and
how people can use food as medicine.
If you look at the spices that have specific brain-optimization
qualities for example, saffron and your mood; cinnamon, it's a natural
aphrodisiac that also helps to balance blood sugar and helps people
focus; and oregano and rosemary that have been shown to boost blood flow
to the brain really what you eat is either helping your brain function
better or it's hurting it."
How to Decelerate the Aging Process in Your Brain
Dr. Amen's book Use Your Brain to Change Your Age is based on his
lectures over the last 15 years. In it, he discusses a study done with
8,000 people. What he found was that over time, the blood flow to your
brain decreases.
"It's sort of like how your skin falls off your face as you age. The
same process is happening in the brain. You can with your behavior
accelerate the aging process, or you can decelerate it.
... We can actually prove you can improve your brain through the imaging
work that we do. There's a whole chapter in the book about reclaiming
your brain. Say you've been bad to your brain. You've been overweight.
You've drank too much. You didn't exercise. You're one of our NFL
players, and you've been hit in the head multiple times. If you adopt a
brain-smart program... you can slow or even in many cases reverse the
aging process in your brain."
He describes his brain-smart program as six words:
Brain Envy:"You have to care about your brain, because it controls
everything you do: how you think, feel, and act, and how you get along
with other people," Dr. Amen says.
Avoid Bad: "You need to avoid anything that hurts your brain drugs
obviously, brain injuries, obesity, but also sleep apnea. Anything that
damages blood vessels damages the brain. Same for hypertension,
cardiovascular disease, negative thinking, untreated depression, the
standard American diet, and alcohol."
Do Good: This includes optimizing your diet, getting physical and mental
exercise, along with taking helpful supplements. It also includes
learning to think in more positive ways.
A couple of years ago, Dr. Amen wrote a home study course for anxiety
and depression. When they tested it on participants around the country,
a significant percentage of them reported losing 20-30 pounds without
trying.
"That got me very excited, because what I realized is with a better
brain, you get a better body," he says. "Because ultimately, your health
is driven by all of the decisions that you've made in your life, and
those decisions come directly from the health of your brain."
More Information
You can learn more about the work at the Amen Clinics at
www.amenclinics.com. The
clinics performed brain SPECT imaging in the context of a full clinical
evaluation. They also provide a wide variety of treatment options. The
online community, The Amen
Solution at Home was developed by Dr. Amen to be a sophisticated
coaching program to help people optimize their brains and bodies.
It starts with a neuropsychological assessment tool, which, in about
35-minutes, will test your memory, reaction time, focus, level of
stress, and mood. Based on how you score, it gives you personalized
games to strengthen your weak areas. It also has brain healthy recipes,
relaxation exercises, and teaches participants how to eliminate negative
thinking patterns.
"It's one of the tools that our NFL players used," he says. "We're very
excited, because as we saw their scores go up, the blood flow to their
brain improved.
Working out your brain in a regular way is important... The important
thing is to learn something that you don't know anything about. Because
if I just kept learning about vitamin D, for example, that would be
useful, but it's really not stretching my brain. So I learn about
gardening, I learn about cooking, I learn a new language, I go to a new
place, or learn a new way to move my body, which I think is incredibly
important. But the orthodoxy in my profession is pretty rigid. And I'm
saddened by it, because it needs to change. Now it became a mission for
me."
While getting a SPECT scan can be expensive, it may save you tons of
money in the long run. According to a recent study by Dr. Amen and his
colleagues, getting a SPECT scan will change what your doctor does 79
percent of the time.
"He'll give you a different diagnosis or a different treatment plan
based on what the scans add to the clinical evaluation," Dr. Amen
explains.
"We have a new outcome study that we're publishing on 500 consecutive
patients that came to the Amen Clinics who were complicated. After six
months, 85 percent showed significant improvements in their quality of
life. We are very excited about our work. And we have been teaching our
colleagues about it for decades. We're not trying to be proprietary with
it at all. There's a whole group in Vancouver that does it based on my
work and a whole group in Toronto, Florida, Texas, and Chicago.
But it's horrifying what's happening overall in psychiatry. I would be
very cautious about seeing a psychiatrist that is not gathering data on
your brain before he or she puts you on multiple medications."
You can also pick up any of Dr. Amen's books, to learn more:
Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
Change Your Brain, Change Your Body
Use Your Brain to Change Your Age
Unleash the Power of the Female Brain is his latest book, which will be
released in February 2013
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