Fearless Youth: Prozac Extinguishes Anxiety by Rejuvenating the Brain: Scientific American:

“The research may help explain why a combination of therapy and antidepressants is more effective at treating depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than either drugs or therapy alone. Antidepressants may prime the adult brain to rewire faulty circuits during therapy.”

(Via www.scientificamerican.com)

Remember when you were in first grade and you stood in line in the cafeteria punching your best friend and saying “gotcha last” and waiting for his punch back? OK, OK…so you didn’t do stuff like that? You must be a girl or something.

Remember looking up at the bulletin board in the cafeteria and seeing the words, “You Are What You Eat!”

Your friend said, “”Duuuuuuhhhhhh! What…Ever!”

You punch him back.

Now here’s the weird part. That little message on the board turned out to be true.

Oops!

So if “you are what you eat”, does that means I turned into a Cheeto when I really wanted to be a fast Cheetah! Darn, so many missed opportunities.

Psychiatrist Dr. Drew Ramsey co-authored The Happiness Diet featured on MSNBC:

We know that the typical American diet — filled with processed food and added sugar — is making us fat. But it’s also making us depressed, according “The Happiness Diet,” a new book that links food to feelings.

It’s amazing to think that every cell in our body turns over. What I mean is this: every cell is replaced by a newer cell. Some are replaced fast, fast – like the skin and the lining of the gut. Some are replaced slow, slow – like the nervous system.

Think of it this way: you will replace every cell in your body (even the ones responsible for regulating mood) many times over during your lifetime. What building materials do you want to use for your new cell structure – Cheez Wiz (what IS that?) or fresh, pesticide-free plants. I’m not advocating eating Cheetahs because that’s just weird. Maybe Laughing Hyena though!

Want to Remember High School?

I’ve always thought that the brain’s memory was a lot like that game Connect Four where each player put round tokens in the top of a tower grid in order to try to get four (red or black) tokens in a row. Commonly the game is a draw because you fill up the slots before anyone can win the game. The only way to to put more tokens in the top is to let the existing tokens slide out the bottom.

Memory is a lot like that – we fill up the memory slots and the more we jam memory tokens in the top of our brain, the more the memory tokens come sliding out the bottom.

Push the memory of last night’s restaurant through the top and out from the bottom pops out the name of our childhood best friend. That just doesn’t seem fair!

It appears that memories aren’t toppling out the bottom of the brain afterall, and in fact they can be access if only by tickling the correct part of the brain. This cool brain blogger Neuroskeptic explains:

“A new paper, however, says different. Philadelphia’s Joshua Jacobs et al report that they found a spot in the left temporal lobe of a male patient, stimulation of which evoked memories of the man’s time at high school. The guy was in his 30s at the time, so these are quite distant memories.”

I had a pretty good high school experience, I think. Maybe some commercial application of this will prove otherwise.

The blogger at Music Matters summarizes an article on how the brain processes music. Very interesting stuff if you love music and the brain!

“It’s a persistent myth to think that music is processed solely in the right hemisphere. This week yet another study shows that, even when the processes are restricted to listening alone, virtually the whole brain is involved.”

As previously stated in my earlier post here that aerobic exercise improves memory in the elderly.

Here’s more evidence:

“To learn more about how exercise affects the brain, scientists in Ireland recently asked a group of sedentary male college students to take part in a memory test followed by strenuous exercise.”

“Notably, the exercised volunteers performed significantly better on the memory test than they had on their first try, while the volunteers who had rested did not improve.”

Read more at How Exercise Benefits the Brain in the New York Times.

It is a little unnerving to think that a parasite as ubiquitous as toxoplasma gondii may be affecting so many human brains.

“Research shows infection by the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii, found in 10-20 per cent of the UK’s population, directly affects the production of dopamine, a key chemical messenger in the brain.”

via Science Daily

Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic infection found primarily in cats and thought to clinically affect humans that have been immunocompromised. Many of us have been infected but have no clinical symptoms and have antibodies against it.

There’ve been some studies showing evidence of toxoplasmosis among patients with mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. It’s thought that there are various contributors to the causes of schizophrenia.

When it comes to the science behind mental illness, we’ve come a long way since witches were burned.

Nevertheless, we still have a very long way to go. So much is still unknown.

Scientific American authors Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz come to a controversial conclusion that dissociative identity disorder (DID) might be a doubtful diagnosis:

“A better approach would be to help patients understand that their painful psychological experiences are created not by different personalities but by different aspects of one troubled personality. That way those suffering could begin to come to grips with these experiences and recognize that their thoughts and feelings are genuinely their own.”

Via Can People Have Multiple Personalities?

The controversy isn’t new. It was going on 20 years ago when I trained.

I personally have some limited experience treating people with this diagnosis. Regardless of the label given to them, the emotional scars are real and long lasting.

Do you punch your bed partner in the middle of the night?

“REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) is a sleep disorder characterized by violent (or other dangerous) behavior during the REM or dream or nightmare phase of sleep. This behavior can include punching, kicking, yelling, jumping out of bed often in response to specific content of the dream that is being experienced. Individuals with RBD can physically injure themselves or their bed partners with their violent behaviors.”

Via Brain Posts: Improving Dementia Diagnosis With a Sleep Marker

Observations: Aerobic exercise bulks up hippocampus, improving memory in older adults: “Many studies have linked exercise with improved brain health later in life. Now a new controlled trial reveals more about how aerobic activity might be helping to bolster the brain by beefing up the hippocampus.”

(Via Scientific America.)

What Does This Mean?

The hippocampus belongs to the limbic system and plays important roles in memory and spatial navigation. The hippocampus contains high levels of glucocorticoid receptors, which make it more vulnerable to stress than most other brain areas.

Exercise supports our hippocampus (and memory) in a couple of important ways:

• Exercise buffers the chronic stress response of glucocorticoids responsible for zapping our hippocampus and worsening our memory. Exercise protects our memory from stress.
• Exercise induces growth factors that promote new brain tissue.

Go exercise! Make some of it aerobic!

Below is the Introduction to my eBook (PDF version).

All proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the National Association of EMTs (NAEMT) Foundation. The mission of the non-profit NAEMT Foundation is to support a better future for EMS through funding EMS education and research.

While the suggested price is $10, you can pay more if you’d like, or you can pay less, including $0. CLICK “ADD TO CART” BELOW!

Enjoy!

Introduction

There have been dozens of books written about Katrina, the Category 5 hurricane that leveled long stretches of the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas and decimated the city of New Orleans in August 2005. The story has been told countless times by survivors, politicians and journalists who were there on the front lines, witnessing the devastation as it happened. Their stories express the unimaginable horror of seeing the bodies of dead men, women, children and animals floating in the putrid floodwaters. They tell of personal loss, grief and devastation. They shine a harsh light on poverty and politics. It has been five years since Katrina, and most of us have heard it all.

But this story is different.

We are the paramedics, EMTs, doctors, nurses, administrators, support staff and volunteers who were on the scene before, during and after Katrina. We were present from the pre-storm evacuations, during the storm, and throughout the surreal and unexpectedly tragic aftermath. The accounts you will read in these pages are told first-hand by healers…the people who treated the wounds of the traumatized and injured, held the sick and dying in their arms, and did their best to create a haven of safety in the midst of terror and chaos.

Katrina gave us an extraordinary new perspective on the work we do. We are accustomed to school bus accidents, murders, heart attacks, suicide attempts and human suffering of all kinds. We are used to pulling mangled bodies out of multi-vehicle car crashes, but we never imagined that Katrina would require us leave our ambulances and offices and face the unknown to care for a sea of suffering New Orleanians. We also could not anticipate that some of the people we were trying to help would end up shooting at us, or that we would run short of supplies, medicine and equipment.

In the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) business, Katrina is what we call a “mass casualty incident.” But we — along with most everyone else in the southern states — never expected it to elevate to such a desperately critical level. Medics compared it to being in a combat zone, and many of the military medics who worked alongside us said that they’d never seen anything like it.

From 1998 to September 2010, I served as the medical director of Acadian Ambulance Service, Inc. (“Acadian”).1 Acadian is based in Lafayette, LA 135 miles west of New Orleans. Most of us rode out the hurricane in our own homes. After the storm passed, we walked outside to find blue skies and gentle winds blowing, just like any other summer day in Louisiana, and it seemed that the area had emerged relatively unscathed. But that was before we knew that the levees had broken and the low-lying areas of New Orleans were beginning to flood. There was no electricity or phone service, so news of the flooding didn’t reach us until the next morning.

As I packed to accompany our paramedics into New Orleans to begin our medical relief operations, I threw my video camera into my duffle bag with the intention of videotaping some of the work we’d be doing. I didn’t realize at the time that I would be way too busy to carry a camera around. In fact I didn’t even open the bag until three or four days later. I was disappointed that I had not been able to document something that most people never see… the medics’ point of view.

Then I got an even better idea. I sent one of my employees in Lafayette to purchase ten digital voice recorders from a local electronics store. I handed one of these recorders to each of my key staff members with these simple instructions: record your experiences and impressions. They in turn passed the recorders on to others so that the first hand accounts would be captured.

The stories in this book are transcriptions of those recordings. I recognized that this was a disaster like no other, and I wanted to make sure the world knew how it looked through the eyes of the emergency medical personnel on the scene. Some of the people you’ll meet in these pages have worked in EMS for decades. Some lost their homes, their possessions, and their pets in the storm. Most worked 20 or 30 hours non-stop in the Superdome, on the freeway underpass that became a makeshift triage2 center, in helicopters, in ambulances, in boats and in our offices, doing whatever needed to be done to meet the needs of an entire city of refugees.

The intent of the book is to document both the deep compassion and the frustration of Acadian’s responders. The stories told by these medics and staff will shock you and touch your heart with their expressions of brotherly love, human kindness and human vulnerability. Although I am extremely proud of my Acadian colleagues, there were countless others who helped with equal dedication. Some of those include the Coast Guard, the National Guard, FEMA, hospitals, EMS, medical professionals, civilian helicopter companies, churches, civic organizations, local businesses and local fire & police departments. Then there were the friends, neighbors and average folks who helped by cooking meals for our medics, bringing us clean clothes, offering their boats, tools and manpower and assisting us in a hundred different ways.

The stories being published herein have not been confirmed or endorsed by Acadian as to their accuracy or content. Acadian takes great pride in the work and dedication of its employees, not only in times of disaster but every day that they commit themselves to a mission of service. In looking back on the days and weeks and months following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there was an overwhelming degree of humanity, persistence, skill, integrity and endurance that was displayed in the field and at home. The faces of those whose lives were touched and who touched every member of the Acadian family in the wake of those storms will never be forgotten.

We walked with angels during that time. We were reminded that material things can be washed away, but that the human spirit is eternal.

Ross Judice, MD